SIMS 2 FAMILY FUN STUFF no cd fixed image help

[kelticvixen]

Hello
I have The Sims 2 and all expansions up to and including Family Fun Stuff. I am stuck until Feb 07 with my aging computer which is running 98SE. Also my cd-rom drives are both persnickety and worn out and my main problem is that lately when running TS2 the game will freeze up when it takes too long to read from the rom drive. It also takes FOREVER to begin installations of TS2 and exp's as it reads and reads and reads. So.... I am attempting to enable a no-cd situation so that I can play without freezes that require hard reboots and end up corrupting all of my installations, etc. Just to rule this out, I have perfectly clean, beautiful disks as I take excellent care of them. I have run my cd-rom cleaning disks in my rom drives. The only thing I have *not* done is actually open my case and manually attempt to clean the lasers on my roms. I'd rather not have to open my tower at this point, and I'm not sure it would help. I'm an avid gamer and have been running these rom drives pretty steadily for the last 4 or whatever years it's been since I got this computer built.

I tried downloading the no-cd fixed exe.patch and while it loads up TS2 Family Fun Stuff, the background where you would normally see your neighborhood is just a solid grey-blue and you can't read text on buttons or anything. All that is visible is the console panel in the bottom left corner of screen.

I gave up on this finally and replaced my "fixed" exe with the actual .exe from the Family Fun Stuff cd again.

This time I installed Alcohol 120% (the version that actually supports 98 supposedly as it DID let me install... I keep running into those "Does not support this platform" errors on the newest version of Alcohol, and Daemon Tools), downloaded the fixed image of Family Fun Stuff from this site, installed SD4 Blocker since SD4 Hide "did not support this platform" and proceeded to mount the image on Alcohol 120%. The first thing I noticed is that although I made sure I downloaded Family Fun Stuff maxi image, when I mounted the image and looked at the contained media on the virtual drive it read as Open For Business. I don't know if this matters.

So.... after mounting the image I ran SD4 Blocker, leaving the window open as instructed. When I first executed SD4 Blocker, I saw the Sims Family Fun Stuff screen pop up! My initial one second of excitement wilted as it quickly disappeared from the screen and nothing else happened. Then I tried just running the .exe from my desktop. Same thing happened! A quick glimpse of The Sims Family Fun Stuff screen pops up like it will load and then disappears. Nothing. Any help on this would be so very much appreciated. I know that I need a new computer, new operating system, but honestly my computer had run TS2 fine including Uni and Night Life expansions. It's the cd-roms that are worn out and causing problems.

Thanks very much in advance, and I hope I have posted this in the proper forum as I am new to this.
Cheers,
Kelticvixen