The Sims 2 - Moving Store Edition saves into Ultimate Collection
by mate54Original Post
This tutorial is intended to help players who have moved their saved games from The Sims 2 Store Edition into The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection. As such, it only applies to The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection or disk installations of The Sims 2 that do not include The Sims 2 Store Edition.
To offer a brief explanation, saved games that were created (or even just loaded) with The Sims 2 Store Edition are not compatible with an earlier version of The Sims 2, which includes The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection. Since Ultimate Collection does not include Store Edition, those saved games are not backwards compatible.
This tutorial will explain the process of making The Sims 2 Store Edition saved games compatible with The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection or The Sims 2 Mansion & Garden Stuff, by editing neighborhoods using SimPE.
PLEASE BE AWARE THAT SimPE IS A FAN-MADE, 3RD PARTY PROGRAM NOT DEVELOPED OR ENDORSED BY EA. PLEASE USE YOUR BEST DISCRETION IF YOU DECIDE TO UTILIZE THIS TOOL.
SimPE 0.75.69 can be downloaded here: http://www.simfileshare.net/download/3502039/
Before editing any files, it is highly recommended that you make a backup, so you can restore it in case something goes wrong. By default, The Sims 2 user data is located in Documents\EA Games. Copy the entire Sims 2 folder to a safe place outside of that folder. In case something goes wrong, you can simply delete the one that gets messed up (do not paste the backup over it), restore the backup and start over.
1. Launch SimPE. In the top left corner, go to Tools – Neighborhood – Neighborhood Browser.
2. Click on the first neighborhood, then select Open. In the bottom left corner, you might see SimPE loading various Sims 2 resources. If so, wait until it loads everything to make sure the program does not freeze.
3. You should see two windows (Resource Tree and Resource List) as well as a list of buttons on the bottom, one of which should be Hex.
(If those do not show up, click on Extra in the top left corner, then go to Preferences – SimPE Settings and select Reset Layout.)
4. In Resource Tree, click on ID Number. In Resource List, click on ID Number again. At the bottom, click on Hex to access SimPE’s Hex Editor. You should see a table with a bunch of numbers.
5. Look for 1f. There should only be one instance of it. Click on it, then under Values/Navigation, in the Byte field, change 0x1f to 0x11.
6. On the right, click Commit, then on the top left, click on File and select Save.
7. Go back to the Neighborhood Browser (Tools - Neighborhood – Neighborhood Browser) and click on the same neighborhood you have just edited. In the Neighborhood Browser, there is an Options section with a drop-down menu, containing every sub-neighborhood attached to the main neighborhood.
8. You will need to repeat the process for all sub-neighborhoods. These may include, but are not limited to: Universities, Downtowns, Shopping Districts, Pets, Weather, Exotic Destinations, Hobbies and Magic. Some of these (such as Pets and Weather) are hidden during gameplay, however they are added to every neighborhood by default. However many of them are, each one has to be fixed.
Once you are done with one neighborhood, move on to the next one. Repeat until all of them show up, and do not forget that each of them very likely has sub-neighborhoods attached.
