rec.autos.simulators

Background:

I've been racing with ICR2 for DOS for a while, with a Sierra Pilot and homemade
pedals. Got a new puter, K6 233, 64Mb, with the new FAT32 Win95 that comes with
new puters these days. Now it won't run the old ICR2 for DOS, and for some
reason the patch upgrades to Win95 version didn't work no matter what I tried. I
gave up and went and got Papyrus CART Racing for Win95, which ought to fix the
problem, right? Wrong. It turns out, the new version of ICR2 won't support
pedals that use the same (combined) axis for the gas and brakes. So I went out
and got a NASCAR Pro Racing setup, which was the highest quality in feel and
appearance I could find, which ought to fix the problem, right? Wrong.

The Problem:

I hooked up the NASCAR wheel/pedals to my sound card game port, set on
"separate",  followed all the instructions, it seemed to calibrate just fine in
Win95 and/or in Propanel. In the test mode, though, it was rather jiggly. In
CART, I calibrated again, but when I went to "set controls", it was getting
input from the various axes without the controls being touched. In calibration,
the arrows were jiggling slightly, but I didn't think it excessive. This made it
impossible to set the controls, because as soon as I hit "modify" the line would
fill with the wrong control. OK, bad game port, right? I pulled my old TM ACM
card out of the old puter, fought for hours to get rid of the sound card game
port, got it figured out, and was all set to drive, right? Wrong. The problem is
still exactly the same, no matter what speed I set the dial at. I actually did
get the controls on the right axes, after much work, but no matter what I do,
either the car won't go at all when I press the gas, or it takes off without any
gas at all, even if the calibration seems to go fairly well, and the arrow
jiggle is very slight.  Oh yeah, I got the dignostic program, tmscope.exe from
TM's website and in that the unit appears rock solid with everything steady and
perfect movement and response. I'm stumped.

Help! Does anyone have any ideas for a solution? Other than heading out for a
refund, that is?

My low-cost, low-tech suggestion: take the harddrive out of your old
machine and install it into the new computer as drive D: (or whatever
seems appropriate.) Make some DOS boot disks first. Now, whenever you
want to run a pure DOS game, install it on the old drive using the
boot disk. You won't be able to access your FAT32 harddisk as long as
you're under DOS, but that seems to be a minor problem.

Another possibility would be to format your C: drive and re-partition
it using the old FAT16. You'll have more slack in your partitions, but
also the option of double boot to DOS / Win95 and still play old DOS
titles. Win95b has a bug that prevents this dual boot option with the
default parameters, but there is a workaround to this. Consult one of
the better Win95 FAQs re: this problem.

--
Wolfgang Preiss       \ E-mail copies of replies to this posting are welcome.
wopr"at"stud.uni-sb.de \ There is no "2" in my real e-mail address.
Uni des Saarlands       \ Sorry for the inconvenience. You know why.

You don't need to go to that much trouble, as DOS 7.0 (the DOS that
Win95 is built on top of) has no problems reading FAT32 drives.  You can
use a Win95 startup disk (create one from the Add/Remove Program Control
Panel) and load whatever drivers you need in your autoexec.bat.  You can
also use the F8 boot menu to boot to the Command Prompt instead of the
GUI (I think it's option 6) or just have Win95 restart in MS-DOS mode.

--
Eric T. Busch

http://ebusch.akorn.net

Similar set-up to yours (K6 233, new HDD with FAT32, T3 (Nascar) wheel).
Had ICR2 running on old FAT16 drive with T3 no problems.  Installed from
scratch on new FAT32 drive, applied Win95 patches, and it runs exactly the
same as before (perfectly) with no problems from the T3.

You have a problem, but it is not FAT32 or the T3 per se.  Your specific
hardware may have problems, but the combo. you are using is fine.

I just bought the NASCAR Pro whell and pedals
I have had the same problem you are describing w/GP2
I MUST run the pedals in combined mode or i cannot get the controls to
calibrate properly
I have redone and changed my thinking based on what i have read on-line about
how to calibrate in windows joystick, etc. NO CHANGE!
If you ever figure out how to use the separate setting, please let me know
I believe the TM NASCAR Pro may hve a glitch
Bob

Dave Hawnt (UK)

I had the exact same jiggly accelerator pedal. Sent Thrustmaster an email and no
response yet. After installing Propanel and doing the calibration on the "separate"
setting the accelerator was jiggly during the "test" mode and during actual play. If
I pulled on the pedal the cursor in test would go all the way to the bottom and when
I pushed it would go all the way to the top. I finally uninstalled the Propanel.
When I did this and went back to Control Panel and the Game Controllers, the
Thrustmaster Nascar Pro w/separate pedals was still listed. I ran through the
calibration again and everything tested and ran as it was supposed to. I also ran
the tmscope.exe and it showed no problem.DEFINITELY A BUG IN PROPANEL!!!

JimC

Thanks to everyone who made all the great suggestions for helping me fix my
problem with Win95 and CART Racing!

While I was waiting for your help, I called TM yesterday morning, and after the
usual (and in this season, reasonably expectable) interminable wait on hold, it
took the very helpful customer service guy about three seconds to tell me what
to do. In short, he said, trash the Win95 version (apparently, Papyrus was
basically forced to put out a Win95 version, but did a fairly bad job of it,
being as they didn't really want to), install the Rendition version from the CD,
and run it after booting to a command prompt. Sure enough, it worked perfect!
You can configure the axes anyway you want, and it calibrates perfectly for me,
and drives really great.  I use cartfast.bat, and understand the older name
Indycar2 works exactly the same with indyfast.bat.  Now I just hope that my
NASCAR Pro holds up better than some of the reports I've seen around here lead
me to believe it might!

Thanks again, everybody, and if you folks at TM keep up with this NG, thanks to
Steve Carter for his cheerful help with this issue.