Category: El Capitan

Sims 3 ‘Unknown Error’ fix – El Capitan, Sierra, High Sierra, Late Night, Ambitions, Fast Lane and Outdoor Living

Published on by BluebellFlora80 Comments

Only applicable to the 32-bit version of the Sims 3

This is the biggest Mac/Sims 3 issue at the moment, apart from the unsupported graphics cards issue which EA STILL haven’t fixed after nearly 4 years…

The Unknown Error is a magical mix of Late Night/Ambitions/Fast Lane/Outdoor Living trying to be installed onto a Mac running macOS 10.11 El Capitan, 10.12 Sierra or 10.13 High Sierra. It’s that simple. We have a thread running over at AHQ where people are posting about it and yesterday a rather super person called corey_0414 posted a solution which appears to actually work (go and show him some love if it works for you 💚). His instructions can be found here. You will also need to check that these packs are showing in your Applications > The Sims 3 folder, if not then follow this guide on moving the relevant files.

Edit – corey_0414 has uploaded a very helpful video to walk you through the fix:

Edit: I have to just make one thing clear here, this Unknown Error issue is very specific to El Capitan/Sierra/High Sierra/Late Night/Ambitions/Fast Lane/Outdoor Living, there are plenty of other reasons why you may be getting the Unknown Error issue. If you do not have one of these operating systems or packs  installed then please do not ask me for help on this page as it is irrelevant. There have always been issues running the game on a Mac and if you have a post-2013 Mac with unsupported Intel/AMD graphics then the game is not technically compatible so getting the game to actually run smoothly would be a miracle.

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macOS Sierra, The Sims 3 and The Sims 4

Published on by BluebellFlora2 Comments

Threads are starting to pop up on the forums with people moaning that their Sims games will not work properly, or at all, since they have updated to macOS Sierra beta. What a surprise! The operating system is in beta which means it will be buggy as hell and apps may not work properly. If you’ve signed up for the public beta it means that you agreed that stuff may not work properly on your Mac under Sierra and you should be reporting bugs and issues to Apple via the Feedback Assistant. You will have also been prompted to use Time Machine to back up your Mac before installing the OS – if you didn’t then give yourself a slap.

If you now can’t play because you opted into the beta program may I suggest you wipe and reinstall El Capitan on your Mac. Alternatively you could install El Capitan/Yosemite/Mavericks onto an external drive and play the Sims on there. Or you could wait until Apple release updates and hope your game works again. Even when Sierra is finally released in a few months time there is no guarantee that EA will support it.

No 3rd party apps are supported under beta versions of any operating systems. Maybe next time stick with the stable OS you are already running?

The Sims 4 unplayable on some 2012 model Macs updated to El Capitan

Published on by BluebellFlora2 Comments

Some Mac users who have upgraded to El Capitan have found their Sims 4 games unplayable. This is due to certain NVIDIA GeForce 6xx series graphics cards no longer being compatible with the game. The affected Macs are mainly those with 512 MB VRAM:

  • Late 2012 21″ iMac – Model Identifier 13,1 – Model No. A1418
  • Late 2012 27″ iMac – Model Identifier 13,2 – Model No. A1419
  • Late 2012 15″ MacBook Pro – Model Identifier 9,1 – Model No. A1286 (650M 512 MB)

And the listed graphics cards are:

  • NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M 512 MB
  • NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 512 MB
  • NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660M 512 MB
  • NVIDIA GeForce GTX 675MX 1024 MB (possibly)

EA are aware of this issue and are issuing a fix….. in December:

SGJanitor

If you want to post on the thread over on the official forums you can find it here.

Sorry for all those affected, this ridiculous situation reminds me of when OS X Lion was released and Sims 3 was unplayable for a lot of Mac users. That took EA a couple of months to fix too. Shameful.