rec.autos.simulators

Just wanted to send a positive message here.
After I downloaded the GPL patch I was first
a bit hesitant to install it.
So I made a disk image backup before testing.
Well, what can I say, it works great in offline
mode. Now with version 1.1.0.3 I still have a
rock solid 36 frames a second
(except when a race starts it goes down to 29-32).
I did not see any of the symptoms that have been
described here in this newsgroup. I also checked
the time it takes for a replay and the GPL clock and
my watch were perfectly in sync.

Unfortunately I haven't got a force feed back wheel yet,
so I used my home-built wheel which looks like a plain
joystick (2 * 100kOhm) to the system. Wheel on x-axis,
throttle/brake on the y-axis, gear on buttons.

Just for reference, here's my system:
Win 98
Asus P2B
Pentium II 450MHz (not o'clocked)
128MB RAM
Adaptec UW-SCSI
Creative Labs Voodoo 2 / 12MB
Diamond Viper TNT V550
Hauppauge Win-TV
Creative Labs Soundblaster Live
connected to a 140W Technics amplifier <grin>

So, I gues my message is: don't give up if it doesn't
work on your system. The patch can't be fundamentally wrong, or
it wouldn't work on any system.

        Norbert
Now seriously considering a force feed back wheel...

and a last comment so you guys can flame me:

Maybe it's working so great,
because my PC is in such a great shape
and absolutely perfect configured !

Joe McGinn
==========================================
Staff Writer for the Sports *** Network
http://www.racesimcentral.net/***.com/
==========================================

You are THE man.

I can really recommend the Logitech Wingman Formula Force, but you need to
hang on to your current pedals (see other posts on the subject), as the
supplied pedals are not suited to GPL.

There's people with immaculately configured PC's having trouble too. I don't
know what makes it work for you and me and not for others, but if/when I
find out I'll post here immediatly.

Jan.
------

Forever in your debt,

Andre

Excellent!

No, seriously, that was meant as a joke and they way I put it in my
previous post was to make sure that everybody sees that.

I'm working for about 20 years in the IT industry and am well aware of
disastrous operating systems, applications, drivers, configurations, etc.

The reason why I posted a bit of information about my system was to maybe
help someone with a similar system who has problems with 1.1.

After all, from a developer point of view, the more structured
information one gets, the higher the chances that a problem can be nailed
down.

I'm willing to provide as much information and support as possible to
make this great simulator run even better than before.

Norbert

Jan, can you disconnect those pedals from the main console?
Are they analog (pot inside)?
If the answer to both questions is yes, then I could use my own pedals.

Thanks and have fun,

        Norbert

Hehe, so you managed to run GPL without an operating system?!
That's cool!

Ruud van Gaal
MarketGraph / MachTech: http://www.marketgraph.nl
Art: http://www.marketgraph.nl/gallery

About system configurations: If there's a new driver available for any
of my cards, I'm one of the first people to download and install it.
And lately I had quite a few completly unexpected crashes. Not only in
GPL, but in many games and programs.

Last Sunday my Windows98 crashed completely. Had to install everything
from scratch again. I installed all the original drivers for all my
hardware first. And you know what? No more crashes whatsoever since
then. And everything works perfectly. No more new drivers for me,
except when a game really needs it.

But the new problems with the new patch.... the slowmo effect, the
real time problems.... I can't imagine that it has something to do
with a 'bad system' configuration... Nobody had these problems before
the patch, and now lots of people have these problems. You state that
you don't have any problems with the patch. Have you tried to time a
replay with a real watch and compared the lap time vs real time?
And your fps counter (alt-f), is it still 36 fps or higher? I'm having
an fps of 37 since the new patch, and online I sometimes have an fps
of 40! And I think this is related to the real time problems.

Andre

If it's not broke, don't fix it.

I usually use the latest drivers (final, not beta), though my approach
differs somewhat.

Before I do any modification to my system, I do a partition image of the
OS-startup partition. That's fairly easy and fast, because I never
install anything except OS-components on this partition which makes it
quite small (509MB in my case).
That way it's just a matter of about two minutes restore, if something
goes wrong.
Images of stable partitions are then burned onto CD (about 3 - 4
compressed ones fit on one CD).

Yeah, did that. It never showed a number higher than 36.xx, though
sometimes I had to look away from the frame counter to stay on the gray
stuff :)

And looking at a recording, my stopwatch was exactly in sync with the
displayed time.

I have the feeling as if all those problems have something to do with the
network setup in Loss98, but I can't back it up. I enabled/disabled my
network components completely but couldn't see any difference.

We had similar problems with Windows looking for WINS server and not
finding them of course. Then there were problems in local network when
systems exchanged their (master)browser-lists.
Who knows, a Microsoft system is unstable per definition !

        Norbert