Chibiabos

The above replies I do not think have made it clear to explain to the original poster that simtropolis has gone through a major revamp/upgrade referred to as version 7 of the site or ST7, and at the moment, as I understand it, the Exchange and other features are not yet online/working. It is my further understanding that this is temporary, and those features will be restored sometime "soon."

I had an ampersand (&) in my password which is a frequent source of ire for password systems (the really bad ones are the ones that will accept it as a password when creating an account, but then hose when I try to log on with it). It did not survive the upgrade, but I reset my password, including the ampersand, and can log on fine now, so it seems you can reset your password to your old one with your old punctuation and should be able to log on afterward with that old password after you have it reset.

I have a Radeon HD 4850, and the game crawls. Unfortunately, graphics cards have little to do wtih it ... the game is extremely CPU intensive, and does not efficiently use all cores, so when you start getting above just 100,000 population or so, on my Phenom 9600 (4 x 2.4 GHz cores) with 4 GB of RAM, it gradually gets so badly lagged that its nigh unplayable. Its better to have a fast dual proc than a multi-core.

That it is a BMP and not a JPeG seemed like an odd cause to me, considering the number of pleasant comment from folks and the fact the config file is BMP. I thought perhaps it was a resolution issue (I noticed some folk mention issues with high resolution on Windows 7 64-bit). I just tested this by deleting the region and starting over ... I did use the BMP (I did not convert to JPeG as you did), I eliminated my custom resolution (my native monitor resolution is 1680x1050) and dropped to 800x600 and re-rendered. The rendering process for this I just clocked at 1 hour on my Quad 2.4 GHz (I know SC4 can only use one core). And ... success! It was the Win7/64-bit with high resolution issue after all. I'm going to suggest the region installation help file I linked to mention this issue, since more and more folk I think like me are going to miss SC4, go back to it, download region maps from ST only to have this mysterious problem.

I downloaded the "Puget Sound" map from https://www.simtropolis.com/stex/details.cfm?id=23993 and followed the instructions at https://www.simtropolis.com/omnibus/index.cfm/Main.SimCity_4.How_to_Install_STEX_BATs,_Lots_and_Maps#How_to_Render_STEX_Maps to generate the region; however, this was the result: I am running SimCity Deluxe Edition on Windows 7 Home (64-bit) on a Phenom 9600 (Quadcore; I know SC4 cannot use multiple cores). My graphics card is a Radeon HD 4850. My drivers are all up to date.