SimCity 2000 label problems?

[ReshiramLover 49]

I am having an issue with SimCity 2000 Special Edition where if I try to place a label (sign) on any park/recreational plop or power plant, I always get an error message that says, "You can't place a label here at this time."

I Googled that error message but only unrelated results showed up in Google. I searched again with quotes and I got "No results for" "Searching without quotes" and the same unrelated results.

I know that it is possible to put labels on parks and power plants because several cities that came bundled with SimCity 2000 Special Edition have labels on power plants and recreational plops.

See attached screenshot of error.

Does anybody know what the problem could be?

[CorinaMarie 29,774]

It has been so long since I've played 2000 that I don't have any idea why that occurs.

Here's hoping someone will see your post and be more helpful than me.

[BobertMcBob 12]

This is caused by how SC2k internally represents anything with a microsim, which is one of 150  small simulations the game runs for specific buildings. The save file has fields called XTXT that stores a pointer to either a sign (with actual sign text stored in the XLAB segment of the save file) or points towards a microsim stored in the XMIC section of the save file.

The reason you can't put a sign on something with a microsim, is that for any tile, the XTXT record can only be pointing to one thing, and the game is programmed such that the microsim always takes priority.

Edit: If you'd like the read more, here's a relatively complete (unofficial) file format specification: https://github.com/dfloer/SC2k-docs/blob/master/sc2 file spec.md#xtxt

Incidentally, this is also where the game stores things like disaster tiles, so you can create some pretty interesting things by directly editing the game saves, like in the attached image (with city available at: http://patcoston.com/sc2k/cities.asp).

  Edited August 15, 2018 by BobertMcBob  
Added link to unofficial .sc2 file spec.