rec.autos.simulators

Good Day GP2'ers

        Just picked up my copy yesterday in San Francisco.  Installed it on my
lovely 486 66 just to see if it was playable.  Could not get the sound
to work (SB 16), but loaded it anyway.  VGA with very little details
is playable.  Thank God.  Anyway, I wanted to see SVGA so I went to my
friends P5 120.

        SVGA is awesome, but I can't help feeling that the reality of speed is
slow.  There is no sensation in speed as your going 180mph through En
Rouge.  Going back to VGA on the P5, the game was too quick, but damn
it really feels like your going 180mph.  I have not had the time to
optimize things in terms of drivers and running it in pure DOS, so
these are just preliminary thoughts.  The way that I see it, we will
not realize the full potential of the game for at least another 2
years or so.  Sure an optimized P6 200 should run it better, but SVGA
with full details and a processor occupancy of under 100%, ya right.

        This game has so much potential, that it is just waiting for the P6
400 or a P7 200 to give it justice.  The combination of video beauty
and awesome sound will keep me motivated for GP2 for a long time.
There are a number of small bugs in the game.  I will add more to the
list as I see them.

List of bugs seen on day 1:

        The F1 cars get too much air !!!
        Graphics sometimes blink (annoying at 3am)
        Crashes are not very sensitive
        Data Logger sometimes crashes
        Can't read a simple Sound Blaster 16, not even manually.
        Results are not always correct

        So, for anyone that has any interest at all for F1 racing, this sim is
a must have.  Hell the sounds alone are good enough to shell out the
$$$ for the game.  This game will not reach its potential for some
time, so it will only get better for us in the future.

Oliver

I had trouble with this at first, untill I realized that the game is setting
your 16-bit DMA.  The SB16 has two DMA's, the typical "1" for 8-bit, and (at
least mine) has "5" set for 16-bit.  The game looked for, found, and set the
DMA to 5, I didn't believe it and reset it to "1", which didn't work.  So set
it for the 16 bit DMA and give it a try.

Many other threads have addressed this.  The game sees your framerate setting
and matches it, but in "game time".  That is, if processor occupancy goes to,
say 240%, and you had set 20 fps, it'll display 20 fps in 2.4 seconds of
real-time, which the game now sees as 1 sec of game time, ie it crawls.  You
have to keep Processor Occupancy below or at 100% for a "realistic" experience.

Hope this helps.
Dave