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Originally posted by: dwyrin Alright, so I'm posting this problem for a friend of mine that has stumped us both... She bought and installed SimCity 4 Deluxe to run on her windows 7. Ran the patch and everything loaded it up fine. We then did the standard tweaks with the shortcut to run the game in windowed widescreen mode as well as tweaked the nvidia control pannel to run the game smoothly without any lag. Everything was fine. Day 2: she reboots her computer and the game crashes immediately after the first bridge sim city 4 splash screen. After some troubleshooting we decide to go ahead and just reinstall, repatch etc.. and the game runs fine again. Day 3: she reboots her computer and we're back with the same problem! Any idea what's going on here and how to fix it? It seems everytime she reboots her computer, this game fails to load and i can't figure out whats changing on reboot that would cause this to happen. (yes, the disk is in) quote> Are you using compatibility options? It might help if you make the exe file Win XP SP2 compatible. Also, if you are using a multi-core CPU (very likely) you might need to set affinity to a single CPU. It is done by modifying the shortcut. Add the following expression after the last " -cpucount:1 In other words the new shortcut should look something like this: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Maxis\SimCity 4 Deluxe\Apps\SimCity 4.exe" -CPUCount:1 Depending on where you have installed the game the path might differ. Hope this helps a bit.

There are several topics posted by people dealing with similar issues albeit with different names or definitions. I, too, had trouble with my HD5850 running SC4, ending up with flickering cars or ghostly pedestrians... SC4 definitely hates ATI cards and anti-aliasing passionately. Try the following solution. I have customized it to fit my own VGA card and it worked. I even posted about it somewhere in this forum. Hope it will be okay for you too. https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=22&threadid=105351#1522998 Let us know how it goes... Oh and make sure to turn down "shadows". For some strange reason "high shadows" tend to make SC4 crawl to a halt. Combined multiple posts. The "Edit" button can be used to add to own posts. -CaptCity

It is probably a "per city" cheat. You might wanna try starting another city and see if the cheat is still active. I am afraid there may be no way to fix this problem without re-importing the city from the original region. Re-installing the game probably will help in that it will overwrite the saved cities you have.

That fix also applies to the problem where cars and pedestrians "phase in and out". It looks like the problem affects (modern) Radeon card users.

Originally posted by: Louich Indeed, theres a hole in the region (original New York region from the game), I cannot click on the city, but the name appears... When I go to the file the all that is there is .sc4 files named : city- New City (2) And it goes from 2 to 49 There is also a file with no number in the name (corrupted file?) Damn I hate this....lol quote> You are probably missing a number in the 2 - 49 sequence as that one should be the city that became a hole in the ground. You can copy only that particular missing city file to fix the hole. When you make a backup of your region be sure to backup the files that do not have a (number) after them. Those are the ones you have developed, whereas the ones with a (number) extension are empty cities, identical to those on the original, never played before version of the region.

I have had a few issues when running at 1680x1050 on a 22" monitor like yours. However the main problem turned out to be the VGA card rather than the screen resolution. SC4 definitely hates anti-aliasing...

I forgot to mention that I have Win 7 Home Premium 64 bit with an ATI HD 5850.

www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm Originally posted by: aminatep I've got a Windows 7 x32, AMD 5200+ and Radeon 3850. Moving objects (cars, vehicles and disasters) are completely invisible, they just show up for portions of a second when I zoom in and out. What to do?quote> I have modified a method that I found on the internet and it worked for me. You might want to give it a shot. Here's the link to the post: https://www.simtropolis.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=24&threadid=117337&enterthread=y#1765214

Rare problem but not unheard of, especially if you use Vista or Win 7 64-bit as the O/S. You might want to check under My Documents (or simply Documents for Win 7) Simcity4 folder. Open the Regions folder there. All regions you have are listed there. Open the one you have problem with. You should see a bunch of City files with the sc4 extension. The ones that say "City - New City (##).sc4" are empty cities. The ones you have already played before will have the names you gave them. See if you can locate the one that is missing. If it is there then that means the save was faulty. In that case you might try to import that particular city into the missing area. Sometimes it helps.

One more thing: Try the "Low" setting for Shadows from within the game options if you have slow scroll speed while scrolling the city or region.

Originally posted by: dominic11 ok, Evertything is set to application control on Hd 4770 as well as on HD 5770, same problem on both cards an European and North American version with or without updates, Software mode is dead city: is the same problem with smoke + you see no (transparent) cars + no humans + half and disappearing windwheels.. same problem as in software mode if i turn AA on quote> Try the following solution (at your own risk). It worked for me for an ATI Radeon HD 5850 VGA card. So I will tell you what you should try for that particular card but if you follow the process you should be able to do the same for your own system. A little long but bear with me. The newer VGA cards are not recognized properly by SC4, hence cause weird glitches. The cars issue you are having is because of that. First of all you should turn off Anti-Aliasing (or check the option to leave it to the program). Anisotropic Filtering does not seem to bother SC4 much, but AA does. You might want to turn off all enhancements just to be sure. Do a Google search and download the program called GPU-Z (from TechPowerUp) and run it. Once the program runs, (on the Graphics Card tab) find the entries called Name and Device ID. Write them down. For my ATI they read ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series and 1002-6899 respectively. Regarding the device ID, the first part is the vendor number, the second part the card ID (1002 for ATI, 6899 for HD 5800). Go to the directory where you installed SimCity. Inside you should find the following files: Graphics Rules.sgr Video Cards.sgr Open up Video Cards.sgr in Notepad. Scroll down until you find the section that starts with vendor "ATI" 0x1002 (see above). You should see a bunch of ATI card models listed underneath. Your card, however, is not listed. After the last ATI card listed you will see the command "end". Then another vendor list follows, etc. Just before that "end" add the following line: card 0x6899 "Radeon HD 5850 Series" Replace 6899 by the number you have obtained from the device ID in the GPU-Z program. Say the device ID was 1002-9999, it should read 0x9999. You should also change the name accordingly. Keep the quotes though. Save and quit. Next, open up Graphics Rules.sgr in Notepad. Scroll down to find the section that starts with: partialRule "Fast card" -any You will see five graphics cards listed there with "Matrox*Parhelia*" being the last entry. Right after that add the following line: stringMatch cardIdentity "ATI*5800*" Instead of 5800 you need to use your own card's name from the GPU-Z program. If it recognized the card to be an ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series then you should put "ATI*5700*". Save, quit and try to run SC4. If the glitch is gone then congrats, you are in fine shape. If it is still there, try the following: Open up Graphics Rules.sgr file again and find the section that starts with: partialRule "Radeon" stringMatch cardIdentity "*Radeon*" Starting with these lines add a # sign to the beginning of every line until you see partialRule "Kyro". The "end" command right before that is the last line you should add a # sign. These # signs mean commenting out those lines. Save and quit. Make sure that AA is off or application controlled. Try SC4 again. Hopefully it will run fine this time... Wow that was long. Thanks for reading. Good luck.

Yeah, the last one posted works...