Forum Discussion
I have been on an adventure of trying on each old laptops I scavenged in my basement. Long story short, all old laptops of mine from 2009 - 2013 suck in terms of hardware and software and the horrendous lag, so i decided to try it on my ultrabook, a Dell XPS 13.
Having a humble setup with only i3-7100u @ 2.4ghz, 4GB of RAM and integrated GPU Intel HD 620 (128mb VRAM), Windows 10 1803 x64 and astonishingly, it's somehow running perfectly well after using Graphics Rules Maker.
But I wont be playing it on my ultrabook as it's cooling system is not that great and it's not meant to game on. And seeing it's running well on integrated GPU i believe its just the game refusing to recognize dedicated GPU like yours being the GTX1070, and mine being the RX480, which is a fair bit idiotic to say the least.
Don't bother checking old videos on YouTube on how to run as it's based on old W10 versions and older hardware. I even found a recent video on YouTube of a guy playing TS2 on his/her MacBook Air (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMerP6aLp2Q&lc=z235uzcammjfghlwc04t1aokgj5ez3dbuioqzan2w0h1bk0h00410). What does a MacBook Air have? A weak integrated GPU--just like my XPS 13.
Performance is a bit chuggy but lowered settings allows 60fps @ 1080p (on my XPS).
Actually, I'm going to try copy pasting the exact gpu rules / sgr files from my XPS to my desktop PC and try running it again. Will see if it bypasses my old problem. Also, I have TS3 on my PC and noticed TS3 and TS2 have similar GPU rules files. I could also try copy pasting TS3 gpu rules content into TS2 to see if it runs.
Also, doubt EA nor Maxis would actually address this as they'd much rather focus milking TS4 and remastering TS2 one day and resell it rather than update old outdated freeware/software that would not make them any money from updating it, and no one would buy it anymore. Oh, this part would probably be edited out by an EA_moderator soon.
Good luck to you. I will update my findings here.
-still disappointed OP
@TahiGoreng , Macs have their own version of Sims 2 available from the Apple App Store so seeing anyone play TS2 on a Mac will definitely not help anyone playing on a Windows machine. Plus the Mac version was ported by another company call Aspyr and they have updated and fixed the game to run on newer Macs and work with newer graphics cards.
However that being said, you should still check out all videos and links as one or two key points may be of use to you and help you to get the game to run. I found that a combination of different solutions helped me to get my game to run, but then I am playing it on Windows 7. Newer version of Windows require the game to be run in Compatibility mode and you should always try the oldest versions of Windows first and move up from there.
You should read everything you can find on the pink flashing graphics. I found several links to different forums and several videos while researching answers for this post. You should to look at the dates these were posted and look at the newer ones first. One may mention something you may not have tried. Sometimes it takes a little bit of this and a little bit of that to get the game to run.