Hi, Tim here....
Thanks for reading...
I have been running Europress' RAC Rally Championship for a couple
of weeks now on an ethernet with 2 or 3 players.
A rather unfortunate 'bug' seems to exist where the screen breaks up:
Bitmaps are being plotted in the wrong place or simply not at
all. The sound sometimes misbehaves at the same time. In severe cases,
the game completely crashes to DOS with debug text strewn across the
screen (which incidentally is still in graphics mode)
At first I thought this was due to the presence of other traffic on
the ethernet blocking the data flow between the 3 machines. However,
having tried a 3-way race on an isolated coaxial cable, the problem
still persists.
Two of the machines are running in command prompt booted Win95 mode
with the univbe51 VESA driver and an IPX network stack for DOS.
The third machine is running in a Win95 DOS shell with 95's native
IPX stack and no VESA bios extensions. Univbe51 and the IPX stack have
been TOTALLY reliable during Duke Nukem 3D network games.
The machines are a P120, P133 and a P166 so I don't think it's a problem
with them not being able to keep up!
The machine which suffers the most from 'break up' is one of the DOS
booted ones. Nothing seems to tie the problem to Win95 or Univbe.
The only thing that is certain is that the player in 'master' mode
NEVER experiences the problem.
Is this a known bug? Has anyone else encountered it?
Its a complete shame cos it comes close to ruining what to us is the
greatest 'deathmatching' network game since Doom & Duke Nukem!
Please, any ideas?
If anyone has an email contact for Europress, I would be very grateful
if they could let me have it.
Cheers, Tim.
PS. An excellent game - total entertainment! :-)