More Awesome Than You!

OK, try and stay with me cause this gets a little long.

I was running TS2:Nightlife on my machine with no issues at all, as many specs as I could find follow:

CPU: Intel p4 3.00
System Memory: 512meg ddr
NVidia Geforce 5700le 128meg grahpics
Windows XP home sp2
Video driver version 78.01
Direct X 9.0c

Then my system pretty much fried and I had to replace the PSU, the Motherboard and CPU and now run

CPU: AMD Sempron 2600+
Motherboard: Winfast 760GXK8MG
System Memory: 512meg ddr
NVidia Geforce 5700le 128meg grahpics
Windows XP home sp2
Video driver version 81.85
DirectX 9.0c

I know I've taken a CPU drop, but it was all I could afford right now, and was willing to take a hit in performance and detail settings to account for this.

I reinstalled the Sims after rebuilding the machine yesterday and now neighbourhoods are either blacking out streets, or throwing blue and green misshapes across the screen.

I have tried adjusting the accelerated graphics settings and rolling back drivers to the ones I was using problem free in the past, but have had very little joy. I did get it to the point where it will run the game for approx 5 - 7 minutes before throwing graphics errors at me, but that's it.

this is one of the rare times Im going to ever say to go over  to the exchange they have some pointers as for whatever reason The AMD system itself has had issues with nightlife look unde technical issues. my daughter has the same spec as you do and when we first instakked nightlife on her computer she had trouble and the Info on the tech support for nightlife helped her get it working  without graphic errors

I've tried searching the bbs without much luck, but who knows :)

In the meantime here is a screenie so you can see more claerly the issue I'm having.

(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v668/jorenne/funkiness.jpg)

First, have you toggled to daytime?>

Second, I also have NVidia, though I can't off-hand remember which one, but it didn't cause any problems with NL, but for a while I just assumed Downtown was meant to be dark - took a thirteen year-old to spot the day-night toggle button!

Yeah it reverts to normal if I pan the camera but then will flick back to that image, and when I say normal, I mean the greenness, but the rivers are black.

I have the eVGA GeForce 5700 LE but mine has 256MB of memory on it. But also have a P4 2.6Ghz processor, 120GB Ultra DMA hard drive, 1.5GB RAM, the 78.01 driver and Direct X 9.c

I have no problems running Nightlife on my computer with that card, the problem might not be your video card.

Have you checked your game options to see if anything is turned off that wasn't before or if any settings are on low that shouldn't be?

Sometimes a graphical problem like that can be caused by the driver. Generally, if your driver is working the way it's supposed to with your programs, there's not usually a need for you to update the driver unless the new driver is specifically fixing an issue with your card model (and older card models aren't always compatible with newer drivers). I would say try rolling the driver back to the driver you had before, but since you've changed your system I don't know if that will work. If the driver information gets stored on the hard drive, then it might work, but I dont know if that's how all that works. I'm not a computer wizard, just an apprentice heh but I dont see how any harm could be done by trying since if it doesn't work you can simply re-update the driver.

Try following Bangelnuts' suggestion and see if you can rule out it being a processor issue. If that doesn't fix it and it's not your game options I would suggest that you try checking your RAM (try going to www.memtest.org and install their RAM tester) to make sure none of it got damaged when your motherboard got fried. And regardless of it working properly or not I would highly suggest increasing your RAM if you can afford it (you can find some good deals on the internet), I know the minimum requirement to run NL is 256MB RAM but that's probably only enough to run it at its lowest settings (I'm not inclined to find out...); you have 512MB but still this is a very graphic intensive game which usually translates to being memory intensive as well, I have 1.5GB RAM and 256MB video card memory and there are settings in my game that are turned off or set at medium settings whereas prior to NL everything was turned on and set to max settings.

If you can't afford to get more RAM yet, try going into Run/msconfig  and playing in diagnostic mode (ie turn off everything you don't need to run the game like every single entry for your anti-virus.  Just exiting from the menu doesn't actually close a lot of the anti-virus applications down, and they use quite a large chunk of your RAM, and if you go offline to play, then you don't need them.  Just remember to return to normal mode before you go bakc on-line.)