I did some more research last week regarding The Sims on the Mac platform. I just couldn't believe that there wasn't someone out there who had figured out why some user-created skins and objects didn't work on Macs and, in fact, crashed the game.

I finally found some information that said that many of the more complicated objects (and particulary "skins"--or body images--that included heads) had file names that were longer than the 31 characters that Macs can handle. When the zipped files are opened on a Mac, file names longer than 31 characters are truncated, so when they're installed, the game doesn't know how to handle them and crashes when it encounters them.

A little more searching around, and I found someone who had created a utility to solve that problem.

It's called FarMaker, named after the particular kind of file container used in The Sims (.far).

There are actually two utilities--Unzipper, which expands ZIP files, makes note of the real file names, and saves those file names in a comment field, and FarMaker, which renames the files and changes the references to them in any associated files, and creates a new file container with a shorter file name.

I tried it this weekend, and it worked!

So now I have a family of Jedi, too.

I didn't want to add Darth Maul into the mix, so my family just includes Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn. The only house they could afford was too small for three people, anyway. Even with just the two of them, they're always bumping into each other in the doorways.

They like to play chess, and sometimes they dance in front of the stereo.