rec.autos.simulators

    First of all, thanks for THE BEST game I have ever played, and I've
played a lot of games.  It does NASCAR Racing a disservice calling it a
game, it is a wonderful experience especially for lifetime NASCAR fans
like me.  But... (you knew that was coming ;-))...  I keep having random
game lockups.  The lockups are most common at Michigan, Rockingham, and
Richmond, least common at Talladega.  These happen both when racing alone
and during multiplayer racing.  One of two things happen:

    1) The video freezes but I can still hear the engine and the game is
still "responsive" -- I can rev the engine, blindly type messages to a
modem racing friend, etc.  Nothing gets me out of the frozen screen except
a reboot.
    2) I get kicked completely out of the game with a DOS4GW error (with
all of the corresponding addresses and messages)

My system: Zeos Pantera 90 MHz Pentium
                  16 MB RAM (not EDO)
                  Soundblaster 16 (A220, I5, D1)
                  Stealth 64 VRAM (2 MB VRAM)
                  Mitsumi 2X CD-ROM
                  HP Deskjet 550 printer
                  Thrustmaster T1
                  MicroCom DeskPorte FAST ES 28.8 external
                  DOS 6.22

I don't have a game card (I use the game port on the SB 16), I am running
a hard drive installation of V1.21.  I have reinstalled the game and
patches twice with no change in the freeze-ups.  The problem has occured
with all versions (1.0, 1.2, and 1.21) of the game.  My config.sys
contains no lines for my NASCAR bootup, the only lines in my autoexec.bat
file for the NASCAR bootup are the SET SOUND and SET BLASTER commands for
the SB16.  I have used a boot disk (made by the game) with same results.
I can run other DOS protected mode games (Doom, Heretic, USNF, Flight
Unlimited, Magic Carpet) without problems.  Two interesting things:

      1) I actually have FEWER freeze-ups when, instead of a "clean" boot
I use my usual boot with QEMM 7.5.
      2) My friend has a system made by Tangent which is otherwise
identical to mine (they probably have different motherboards) and he never
has freeze-ups.

Am I alone?  Do other people who, like me, are well versed in computers
have freeze-ups too?  Does Papyrus have any suggestions?  Is a newer
version of the game being worked on that will address these problems?

Thanks for reading this novel,

Scott
Scott M. Petty

I too get these dos4gw errors (page faults and invalid op-codes), but
only when I run my dx4-100 system at 120MHz.

I too have no problems at all runnning a lot of other games (at 120MHz)
such as Superkarts, F1GP, Terminal Velocity, Doom2, Rott as well as
Windows 3.11 and every diagnostic and benchmark piece of software I can
lay my hands on.

I too think Nascar is great and much prefer to play it on my machine
overclocked because it makes SVGA really playable (for a few minutes that
is until it crashes).

One really weird thing I have found is that the game does not crash at
all (again 120MHz) if I just do pre-season testing (no opponents on the
track).  What is it about the extra complexity involved in controlling
opponents that causes these errors???

Oh, and yes I have tried clean reboots and every other combination of
univesa, himem, emm etc there is, although I have never needed to load
the soundblaster drivers at bootup.

If you get any kind of an answer to this from Papyrus, or anyone else out
there knows whats going on I too would be very glad to hear about it.

That's the end of my Autobiography..

Richard Miles

Thanx, Dan

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