I got CART Precision Racing last Christmas as a gift from someone and tried
it immediately but could not control the cars at all with the Sidewinder 3D
Pro joystick, and gave up on the game after a few weeks or so. Two weeks
ago I got the Thrustmaster NASCAR Pro steering wheel setup, and my opinion
of CPR has changed 360 degrees since then. I was able to get around the
ovals right away, and can even get around some of the road courses without
crashing, if I stay at slow speeds. The road courses are a matter of
learning the courses.
Anyway, I thought the game was killer and I had no complaints at all really
until I discovered this newsgroup a few nights ago. I learned about the
patch at the Microsoft site (downloaded and installed it after that) and the
game's history from the newsgroup. But I was surprised to see so many
negative opinions on the newsgroup about the game, but then it seems that a
lot of the posters are hard-core sim users who have super-high expectations.
I had
no expectations about the game prior to using it, so being able to pretend
to be driving an IndyCar at all is an unbelievable thrill to me.
I have a long way to go until I master the game - I'm still in the rookie
mode and learning the tracks, car setups, options, etc. For comparison's
sake, however, I bought NASCAR Racing 2 game over the weekend and tried that
out.
It's only been a couple of days, and I'm far from mastering the NASCAR game
as well, but my initial reaction is that both games have their good and bad
points. One bad thing about NASCAR, IMO, is that it's still a DOS game
(although I have not had any Windows/DOS problems at all with it, and I run
it under Win98). I love the radio in NASCAR, however, and the spotter
giving information over it. I wish CPR had that feature - in fact, I'm
surprised it doesn't given the details it does have.
For realism, I checked the 0-60 and 0-100 accelleration times of both games
using my stopwatch, and both games are accurate according to magazine tests
of the real cars: I got less than 3 seconds 0-60 and less than 5 seconds
0-100 for the IndyCars, and about 4 seconds 0-60 and 6 seconds 0-100 for the
NASCAR cars.
The braking in the NASCARS seems not nearly as good as the IndyCars, but
maybe this is correct since the IndyCars weigh less than half of what the
NASCAR cars weigh.
Anyway, my questions:
- I see guys talking about frame rates. Is this the number that shows up in
the lower left corner of the screen when you type "frame"? Mine is only
showing up as 6 or 7! I read posts talking about rates between 30 and 60!
If so, I must not be seeing CPR at all as it was intended.
- My current system is a Gateway P5-100 with 64MB RAM and Windows98. No
MMX. The video card is the ATI Winturbo Mach64 PCI. I just added a Monster
3D graphics accellerator. Would I see a noticeable performance increase in
CPR if I added a 200MHz overdrive processor such as the Evergreen MXPro200
(about $110)? Please don't suggest a motherboard/processor upgrade as I am
not willing to spend more than $100 or so on my current system. I'll be
getting a new system probably next year sometime, so I'm just interested in
using what I have until then.
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Bill Jones e-mail addresses:
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