rec.autos.simulators

Hi Sim Folks:

   I've been pretty happy with F1RS in the 6 months I've
had it.  But my PC will freeze hard sometimes when running
F1RS, other sims, and Netscape.  Hard resets are always
accompanied, when bringing the system back up, by those
*** blue screens telling me that the disks are being
scanned.  Solaris on my PC, on which I make my living,
well, I don't remember the last time Solaris crashed.  
I've lost count of the Win95 crashes, a couple of times
a week at least, so about 100 times in the last 6 months is
a reasonable estimate.  

   Are these hard resets damaging the contents of my drive?  
I don't know.  Clearly it has been subjected to an insult,
using the medical definition of that term.  

   This was the situation my system was in when I installed
Office 97 and the F1RS 1.09 patch a couple of weeks ago.  

   My next race was horrifying.  I'm not good enough to run
two hour races in the middle difficulty setting without
loosing it bad, so I save every lap or two.  Sometimes I
would reload the last "saved during race" to see stutter
of 1 second.  You know, the slide show kind of thing.  
Abandoning the race and restarting would make this go away,
but any load of the saved race might cause the problem again.  
Any attempt to view replays would dump me back to Win 95, or
freeze the system, requiring another hard boot.  

   I went to a tape backup made before the Office 97 install,
and attempted a recovery.  The recovery failed, thanks
Cheyenne Backup.  I then went to a very old tape image, I
don't backup my Win95, used for sims and netscape, as often
as I would if it was a more important platform.  

   This tape was six months old, made before I even had my
joystick and Pure 3D drivers set up. And before the drive
had been subjected to all these hard boots.  I then finished
setting the machine up, installed the newest Canopus and F1RS
patches, and things have been fine after that.  

   I now get one or two tiny, harmless, pauses once or twice
during some full length races.  Nothing that causes problems,
I'm down the road 20 meters before I even realize it happened.  
These pauses don't seem more likely to happen on the first lap
than the 50th lap.  I think they can happen on any track, but
I'm noticing them mostly on Monaco, but I'm burning that track
into my mind in preparation for next weekend's race.  I've done
3 or 4 full length races there, some had no pauses.  

   Was my problem Office 97?  Or the accumulated little insults
to my drive by repeated hard boots of Win 95?  

   I don't know for sure.  If problems were accumulating from
all of the hard restarts, they seem to have gone completely to
Hell after Office 97 was installed.  

   My machine is an old PPro, 1/4 Gig of memory, Pure 3D,
Ultra SCSI drives, 4.00.950 B version of Win 95.  Full install
of F1RS, no aids, replay and full collision damage enabled.  

   My problem seems to be solved, good luck.  The next time
I need to send out an invoice, I'll back up the system and
load Office 97 again.  But for now, I consider it to be the
prime suspect.  That, and the fact that Win 95 is a buggy
piece of shit.  

   My wildest sim fantasy?  These new digital joystick cards
don't require the interrupts be disabled.  This means Unix
drivers can be made for them.  Unix almost never crashes...
There might be other technical issues that prevent Unix from
being a sim platform.  And most of you don't have a clue of
how nice Unix is, or any interest in learning.  It does like
LOTS of memory.  I did say this was a fantasy.  

                                                      Larry

Hi Larry!

Absolutely not, apart from maybe pure blindness and greed from game
publishers. The win95-only approach is the main reason I refuse to buy
or play F1RS. This platform absolutely sucks as a game platform, and
all those "oh-you-dont-have-to-rewrite-stuff" because win95 supports
all of it is pure ***IMHO: just try using a flightstick or a wheel
in two different setups, re-calibrating them all the time etc. Before
my win95-friend has driven two laps at monza in F1RS with all the
setting changes going on I have nearly completed a 100% race in GP2,
and that includes booting into DOS from Linux and writing a race
report for r.a.s. . ;-)

Digital devices suck for racing sims, but analog support has
been with Linux for at least three years now.

I think that even game companies might begin taking a look at Linux as
a *** platform: Everything is there a serious game needs: sound
support, joystick support, 3dfx support, a REAL tcp/ip implementation
(that happpens to be the fastest on the planet in constrast to
microsoft's mickey-mouse-stack with new security bugs discovered every
other day ;-), everything you could wish for. And I'm not getting tired
beating the fact to death that quake II only suffers a 3-5% (percent!)
frame rate loss as compared to the o-so-fast win version. IMHO That
tells a lot about the underlying OS as much as anything. ;-)

So, the bottom line: if we keep asking publishers for Linux versions,
some day we might get heard. Papy, are you listening?  How about a
Linux version of GPL? I won't go as far as asking Microprose, they
don't know their ***from a hole in the ground when it comes to
customer support.

Regards, thanks for listening  & happy racing,

Uwe.

--
 Spam-proof e-mail: Uwe Schuerkamp <hoover at telemedia . de>
http://www.racesimcentral.net/~hoover ////// Phone: +49-5241-80-10-66
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Yesterday, after I posted the first message of this thread,
I quit netscape and left Win 95 running while I did other
things.  When I came back to my PC, Win 95 was frozen.  

   So doing nothing can exceed Win 95's capacity!  And this
was after restoring Win 95 from a tape made after it had
just been installed.  

   So I re-loaded Win 95 from tape again.  

   Then today, while composing this message, I got Netscape's
"Reestablish connection" window.  And the system froze again!  

   Restarting after each of these was accompanied by the
"Windows was not properly shut down ..." page.  

   < Snip >

   I know of no new sims being developed for DOS.  And F1RS is
a great sim.  It runs well under Win 95.  So do many new flight
sims.  

   I sympathize, of course.  DOS is NOT an operating system, it
is a program loader that goes dormant when your sim is running.  
This is good.  This allows all of your computer's resources to
be devoted to the sim.  Operating systems are always awake, and
will consume a small number of CPU cycles to support their
services, even if you are the only user of the computer.  

     < Snip >

   I'm referring to a new generation of digital game port.  These
aren't on/off devices.  These read the analog sticks and wheels
we use today, and deliver resolutions similar to analog game
ports.  However, they don't require the driver to turn off
interrupts and go into a tight loop to count the time it takes
an R/C to discharge.  If interrupts are not turned off, you might
start a count loop, then service an interrupt to perform some
task, then go back to finish the count.  But the R/C would be
discharging while you were servicing the interrupt, so you
wouldn't have an accurate count of loops, and the sim will get
inaccurate indication of the position of the stick.  

   An example of digital game ports is the DPDI, or PDPI, L4.  
There is a review at www.combatsim.com.  

   I haven't seen the detailed specs, but I think the stick
position is simply read from a register, which is continuously
updated.  This might not be correct, but the important thing
is no interrupts are disabled, and no loop is required.  

   Have you tried using a joystick with Linux?  I'm mystified
by reports that Linux supports joysticks.  I can't imagine any
Unix disabling interrupts for any reason.  I can't imagine a
traditional analog joystick card being read accurately if you
don't.

   And multi-processing.  

   3DFX?  Cool.  Is OpenGL supported?  Have you seen it in use?  

   Quake II?  I think Doom was developed on Unix, was Quake II?  
I can vouch that Unix is a great environment for developing
programs.  How do I get a copy of Unix Quake II?  I already
purchased the Win 95 version.  

   I just bought a 9 Gig disk.  If I can get Quake II for it,
I'll make room for it.  I have a year old Redhat that is
sitting on the shelf.  

   Sounds good to me.  I think they already have two sold.  Come
on Papy, that's $80.00 you can be making.  : )

   Thanks for responding.  

                                                        Larry