rec.autos.simulators

Have you race and take it with you!!
Anyone have experience with Nascar Racing (1or2) on laptop or nootbook
system??
Sure would like to take racing along when we travel.
Thoughts??

G_Hagon on hawaii
http://www.angelfire.com/mi/NIS/

2nd thought.... Direct connect, head 2 head would be much easier, but
refer to the first thought.

Mike

Yesterday I received my new IBM ThinkPad 760ED. This is IBM's top model,
with 133MHz Pentium, 256K cache, full PCI bus, 1.2 GB hard drive, 4X
CD-ROM, 48MB RAM, 12.1" active matrix screen, and a Trident *** 9385
video chipset with 2MB VRAM (They did recently upgrade this model, with a
6X CD-ROM, 2.1 GB hard drive, and XGA 12.1" screen).

This system routinely benchmarks as one of the fastest laptops available.
Well, it was fast in Win95, but the true measure of its performance is how
it runs racing sims (IMHO). Although I haven't installed Nascar 1 or 2 on
it yet, I have installed ICR2. Running in SVGA, it runs great! I do turn
off asphalt, grass, and grandstand textures, but I also used to do this on
my desktop (P166, Matrox Millenium). With other cars around, it has dropped
to 22fps, but most of the time it stays around 27-30fps. I consider this to
be excellent performance for a laptop. I would imagine that Nascar 2 would
get similar, although maybe a tad slower performance, but I would guess it
would be entirely acceptable.

One more thing-it also has a built in MIDI/joystick port, so there is no
need to but a PC Card adaptor for your wheel.

One thing about it though-it sure ain't cheap! I've seen them lately at
mail order ads for $5300-5999, although this is better than the $7000 I had
seen it for a few months previous at the same places (CDW, Insight, etc.).
I got mine sealed in the box from a guy for a steal at $4000, with the
extra 32MB DIMM.

I'm sure there are other laptops available that would do an excellent job
for these sims, but this is the only one I've personally found that does
the job as well as most desktops. Feel free to e-mail me if you have any
more questions or comments.

Eric Giles

It works fairly well on my Toshiba Satellite Pro 415CS.  I have a New
Media BASICS Gameport PC Card Adapter for my joystick/wheel, and other
than looking at a small passive screen, I can race in decent fashion.

The best is when I hook the external monitor port to my TV and race in
27" of viewing splendor!

Kyle Stevens

At least on my PB1400 (117 MHz 603e), it's dog slow.  And carting my wheel
and pedals along makes it much less protable :-)

The frame rate drops to something hideous like 9 fps, with all of the
texture mapping dropping out.

It's really not even playable like that.

YMMV.

-Frank

--
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Frank Filipanits Jr.     "Show me kindness, show me beauty, show me truth..."
Audio DSP Engineer                       '68 Mustang          BS EE  Caltech  
http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~franko    '68 Charger          MS MuE U. Miami