Can you still download USGS data to make maps?

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A long time ago I created a 1:1 game scape map of the Cleveland area.  The region exists on my machine still, but the files used to generate the map seem to be long gone.  I screwed up the config.bmp and want to realign the layout of the cities in the region.  I was going to start over from scratch, but the USGS site seems to have changed dramatically since whenever the tutorial for this was written.   Can you still find good data to make a map of a real world region to accurate scale?  

If not, is there a way I can "reset" the region that I already have, but with re-drawn city boundaries?

[DCMetro34 577]

Not long ago I used this tutorial and it helped me get the region I wanted. I don't recall the site being too different from the tutorial though.

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Hm, I did see what I did wrong on the site.

However, when I imported the map, the result was all ocean.  Strangely, when I enter a city, and globally increase the landmass level, it appears that what I have is an inverse image of what I want.  Areas that should be water rise up first.

I followed the tutorial that said water should be RGB 65, higher elevations with greater RGB values.  Here are images of the game, and the section of the grayscale map for that area of the city.

[Duke87 1,070]

Well, if you seem to have an inversion of reality... how about seeing what happens if you color invert the image and render that one instead?

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Possibly, but it doesn't make any sense. In any case, I tried it and got the same result.

[tungston 19]

Color values for grayscale.jpg, [without a height mod in the plugins folder].:

RGB= 0: 252 meters (827 feet) below sea level
RGB= 84: Sea level
RGB= 255: 513 meters (1683 feet) above sea level

Other elevation values:

RGB= 50: 102 meters (335 feet) below sea level
RGB=100: 48 meters (157 feet) above sea level
RGB= 150: 198 meters (650 feet) above sea level
RGB= 200: 348 meters (1142 feet) above sea level

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I checked and noticed that the lake area had some spots with RGB 66 rather than 65. That sort of explains the pock-marked surface of the "lake" in the picture I posted. I changed all 66 to 65 and this seemed to work. Very difficult measuring scale and this town has an obscene amount of diagonal bridges... :-)