well all of this topic I have to say is very disappointing
news. I had looked forward to (firstly) and (latterly) had
great fun 'playing' GPL since about 1996 when it became clear
it was under development. I paid 30ukp for the game and have
had I would guess about 500ukp of enjoyment from it. I see no
reason NOT to play it for many years to come - there is
nothing comparable even remotely on the horizon.
Modern F1 (and consequently sims) I feel have become far too
predictable and boring - hell the tracks do not have a
fraction of the challenge that the ring, Spa, or many of the
other GPL ones do, not to mention the cars.
I am perhaps older than the average RAS GPLer and my hard drive
has been almost exclusively race-sim orientated from the days
of the original Indy 500. From 1998 on I built my machines to
handle papy sims at their best (Celeron Rendition then Celeron
V3, now running AMD Duron o/c to 1000 MHz with Geforce 2).
(Still not able to run N4 flat-out though ! ).
So what is the solution for our happy band - I doubt very much
if another patch for GPL would ever appear - though I refuse to
believe that having done it for N4 it would be THAT major a
programming job for GPL.
The solution however is probably going to be building bespoke
machines with a range of FSB/multiplier options so that CPU can be
run under 1.4 G if need be. Just checked that my ABIT KT7A RAID can
be underclocked to 500MHz. I won't upgrade motherboard for 2 years I
guess, and even that future upgrade I will make sure will run
sufficiently slowly to run GPL, if no alternative is found in the
mean-time.
Finally I hope this won't discourage all of the community
producing tracks, cars and other utilities for GPL. Your
efforts are so valued.
Just my ha-penny worth
Ian
