A while back I found out a bloke I work with had raced competitively in
his youth (the 70's), even racing at the Nurburgring. He had a slot1 PC of
some description so I threw one of my spare copies of GPL at him. But he
never got round to looking at it before a lightning strike on the phone
line zapped his modem & motherboard.
Anyway, six months later he mentioned to me that he was still pc-less. I
was in the embarrassing position of having 3 PCs on my desk, one of which
only ever got turned on when I wanted to remember what Win98 looks like.
Then I'd shudder and turn it off again.
So my work mate is now the proud owner (or at least borrower until he
finds some cash) of a PC capable of running GPL well (Piii600, 256Mb,
Voodoo3). And yesterday he had time to himself to try it with the joystick
I threw in.
He *loves* it, and is completely amazed that the car behaves so
realistically. In fact it was really nice to see the pleasure he's
obviously getting from discovering our hobby.
It's early days for his GPL career, and I need to put together a resource
CD for him now he's hooked (starting with Nunnini's guide), but he's
already got under nine minutes at the Ring. Scary! That's with the
Ferrari's default setup and, from the sound of it, a joystick which he's
managed to un-calibrate after I carefully set it up optimally.
Hopefully his timing's out by about half an hour :-)... it took me months
to get under ten minutes. Oh, and he hasn't tried any other tracks yet! I
feel so inadequate :-)
Andrew McP... spreading the word, and the word is "divorce". His wife will
hate me.
PS I discovered last night he always visits a Nascar race on his
occasional trips to the States. I suspect he might just find my N2002 CD
of some small interest :-)