couple left at 6 PM.
My system - P2-263, 75 Mhz bus, Rendition v2100 4mb /55Mhz, Voodoo2 12mb/95
Mhz, Original Monster Sound. GP1 Wheel and CH Pedals. Cable modem.
Tried Monza, Monaco and the ring, mostly in the advanced trainer. These
cars are a handful. Monza it was tough going straight even in 5 gear in the
default setup - seems setup tweaking is going to be mandatory. (But I have
heard that motorcycles' rear tires rotate 12? mph faster at top speed do to
slip so maybe this is right). Countering with the wheel helped settle
things down.
The ring was cool and quite tough. Using the tree line to judge turn
sharpness over the hills because I can't remember them all. Farms, valley
views and telephone wires. Getting onto the straight after all the turns on
the back side. Concrete banked gullies. Wow.
Left foot braking on a separate axis did seem to give better control, as did
the GP1 paddle clutch, though the clutch seems to have a very narrow
engagement range. (Just like my car which with the original clutch at 200k
seems to have some glazing or something.) I can see why joysticks might be
good to as you have to be fast to catch it.
Car control had some neat moments, like getting into a bad power slide,
mashing the breaks to stop the angular turn, and having the car come back
around. Using the grass slope as banking at the ring and making it back on
the track. Loosing it off the left side of the track and having the car
swing back across the track because the wheels are rolling - the car
'fluttering like a leaf' due to the rolling wheel friction in spins.
Pushing in a corner at slow speed until enough speed is scrubbed of for the
front to come around (Monaco).
I tried both the rendition and voodoo2. With rendition in 800x600 I wasn't
able to manage much more than 18 fps consistently during practice with
anti-alias off, mirrors on car/track and detail on medium. Single voodoo2
would do 1024x768, but I found that the scenery 'chunked' along on my system
(even though the frame rate stayed up - CPU occupation?) at anything more
than 800x600, mirrors = track and cars, detail = 3/4, all other options on.
800x600 seems to run close to the 36 fps mark consistently with no tree
chunking. Rendition anti-alias looked good, but texture flashing (windows
at monaco) seemed worse and the speed wasn't quite as good. Maybe the v3000
will pull ahead...
On to setups, opponents and full power GP cars next...