far it's been a frustrating experience, and I'm hoping some kind soul
might have pity on a newbie and offer some advice. I've spent a
considerable time reading archives of this group, but I still have
some problems.
First the system info stuff:
System 1: Athlon 1.2, 512 Mb, Win98 (dual boot w/ Mandrake Linux),
GeForce3
System 2: Celeron 433, 128 Mb, GeForce3, Win2K (dual boot w/
Mandrake)
Common HW: Logitech force feedback wheel
I first bought NFS:PU, which runs great on the Win98 box, but I
quickly found it more arcadish than anything, and I'm really after a
more serious simulator. So I poked around in dej^h^h^hGoogle's usenet
archives, and discovered some people saying good things about F1 2001,
so I got that.
Now, it *looks* like pretty much what I'm after - a more serious
simulator with expansion possibilities. But heck if I can get it
working on either machine. I've downloaded the most recent patch I
could find, and I'm running the latest nVidia drivers as of yesterday,
with DX 8.1, but I still have these problems:
* On system 1, the actual framerate is fine, but the graphics are
"jerky" - it's hard to explain exactly, but it is quite unplayable.
The machine far exceeds the min specs on the box, and it runs
everything else fine (including some heavy 3D stuff like Fly2,
MSFS2K2, etc etc). It just stutters way too much to be playable,
despite running at 40+ FPS.
* On system 2, which also runs most 3D just fine (albeit slower),
the game runs up until the point where I would get to drive, and then
immediately dumps back out to the 2D menus, or sometimes just hangs
the system entirely.
After failing to get both machines working, I poked around in Google
and found some advice from this group saying to try running in
windowed mode. I did, and no difference at all on either machine.
I've also tried running with FRAPS, which also changes nothing :-(
I've checked that the 3D card is not sharing an IRQ with anything else
on the system. I'm not sure what else to do, but at the moment I'm
basically out $19 for a nonfunctional game.
I'm willing to just eat this cost and move to something else, *if* I
can find something else to move to! But it seems difficult. Here's
what I'm after - recommendations are most welcome.
* A sim, not an arcade game. Physics as real as possible, etc.
* I could not possibly be less interested in NASCAR :-).
* I'm after modern era cars.
* Eye and ear candy is good.
* Something with decent expansion potential is a bonus.
Help please?? Either advice on getting F1 2001 running, or on
something to replace it with, would be swell :-)