Thank you! I got the short version (above) in my head, then dove into the long version, which helped me have a better idea of what I was doing. I made a quick sign for my hood. <SIMelissa doing the happy dance>
The cute sign on the left is by Buntah on TSR. The one on the right is my me. I was more focused on the process than the actual signage, which needs to be redone. But I'm very happy that I was able to change the image and have it show up in the game.


I worked on this outside of the game (something I didn't know I could do), but SimPE still insisted on loading my game when I opened it. Is this normal? Is there a way to change that? I'm nervous about inadvertently messing up something that I can't undo.

Good for you! i think it looks perfect. I am not sure i understand what you said last about SimPE wanting to launch your game?

SimPE and The Sims2 should not be open at the same time. There is a way to launch the game from SimPE, but it's a separate button from everything else (and I think quits SimPE; never done it.) Please describe what happens more precisely.

I know I've used Bodyshop to fix sims with broken templates before, because I have a fixed teen Goth Tricou clone in Widespot. But when I tried it with Joshua Ruben's daughter Amanda - on whom this trick has worked before! Only that clone got purged at some point, by accident - last week, I couldn't get it to work! I don't know if I'm stupider than I was before (a distinct possibility, as I'm sleep-deprived most of the time lately), or if there was some piece of CC missing that made it work, or what. I know argon_archfix is safe in the downloads - it was the first thing I checked.

So if anybody else who's done this can walk me through it, I'm sure other people would benefit from the instructions, too.

I think that was the problem. I had my game open at the same time.
I opened SimPE and got a message that the CEP Enable color package was not available because it was being used by another process (Sims 2). Then it gave me a BUNCH of other notices about different objects that were also in use. I don't remember what they were. I tried to tell it "OK" and then click them closed, but they kept coming. Finally, I used Task Manager to end SimPE, closed out my game and tried again.

My little pea-brain is fried today, but I'll go through the process again in a day or two, while it is somewhat fresh in my mind, and give it another whirl -- with the game closed.

It's usually a good idea to close down SimPE and other programs that use the sim files before you open the game. SimPE can be opened before the game (pretty sure of this), but since they use the same files, you won't be able to save anything the game currently uses, so files for editing need to be placed elsewhere.

You can run SimPE and Bodyshop at the same time, as long as you open SimPE first - but in that case you should only use SimPE for editing files outside the Downloads folder or game folder (copy or move the files you're working on to the desktop). I've used this method (paired with the filenameTooltip tool) to recategorize and sort clothes and other CAS items lately - it's very effective.