Deluxe Addict

Well ... in this case I obviously recommend staying with the wife and abandon the game of course ! As you should continue in the forums leave the recommendation to avoid double posting so if you forget something in the last post use the edit option. Ok! NC. Got it. Cheers!

Yes, that is another option. Though I never really got used to Linux. Slightly off topic: There is yet another option. That is, theoretically. Frontier:First Encounters just came to my mind. You know the story? It was full of bugs and it took a whole round of patches to get it reasonably stable, but some folks just loved it (me, too). Well, DOS faded away and David Braben wouldn't provide an FFE follow-up for almost twenty years. So some enthusiasts just reverse engineered it and provided a DirectX interface. Installed it twice. It really worked. But the second time I installed it, the virus alarm went off almost instantly. On second thought - not an option. OK - problem solved, at least for now. Thanks to all for the support. [EDIT: reverse engineering was the intended term.]

Windowed mode is the answer. Not as cool as Full HD in fullscreen mode, but good enough to continue playing. It even works with custom resolution. I will find out what works best. NCGAIO, thanks for reminding me of the windowed mode, and thanks for the links again. Indeed - it's not a game, it's a hobby. I never thought of keeping old hardware just for playing old games,. Maybe I should keep my old rig with the last working graphics driver instead of giving it away...? My wife wouldn't be amused by another dust catcher. Will think about it, though.

Confirmed - Software rendering works with version 347.09, but not with 347.25. So Nvidia introduced a breaking change in the latest driver. I will try windowed mode and OpenGL rendering as soon as I have re-installed the latest driver, post the results, and close the thread. NCGAIO - I guess you're right, and clearly the end of SC4 will inevitably come - maybe very soon. Nevertheless I'll miss it. Thanks for the link, that seems to be the most exhaustive compilation of SC4 command line options ever.

Didn't try integrated graphics, but compatibility mode was no help.

I am not ready to abandon all hope yet. Software rendering also stopped working. The screen is utterly black except for a small rectangular patch of binary noise in the upper left corner. I didn't mention it because there might have been a different reason for this, but it would make perfect sense if there was some sort of addressing error in the legacy interface SC4 uses to access the graphics buffer(s), affecting both read and write operations. When creating the city preview for the region view using hardware rendering, SC4 lets the hardware do the work and then tries to retrieve the rendered image but gets some random memory content. Using software rendering, SC4 does the 3D rendering part but still has to put the resulting image into the back buffer in order to have it displayed on the screen. But if the driver writes the image to the wrong location... I will check if software rendering still works with the previous driver. I'll bet it does. Another thing worth to give a try might be to explicitly select DirectX or OpenGL rendering in order to see if one of them still works. Will check that as well.

Just FYI: If you updated your GeForce driver recently and suddenly experience a catastrophic glitch in the region view after saving a city, try re-installing the previous driver version. All recent NVIDIA drivers may be affected. I experienced this on my old rig after installing driver version 340.52 for the GeForce GTS 250 on Windows 7 64 bit. Suspected the driver but didn't verify it. Bought a new machine in January, equipped with a GeForce GTX 970, driver version 347.09. Installed SimCity and played for a while. No problem. Updated to version 347.25. Same problem again. Re-installed 347.09. Problem gone. I'm using SimCity 4 Deluxe, patched to 1.1.638; no mods or tweaks or anything. Use hardware rendering, 32 bit color. Screen resolution doesn't seem to matter. I submitted a bug report to NVIDIA. If we're lucky, they'll fix it. If not - goodbye, SimCity 4. I won't stick to an old driver version forever. Cheers, Wolfgang