rec.autos.simulators

I have obtained a free CH Products Gamecard 3 Automatic.  Will it improve
frame rate performance of games such as GPL on a newer Pentium II system
compared to simply using the game port on my soundblaster 32 soundcard? Would
frame rate performance be much better, slightly better (i.e. not worth the
trouble of installing) or non-exsistent?  Thanks for your help!

Hey Dave:  Why not use the game port on the Montego?  I'm thinking of
getting that card and am interested in the performance of the joystick
port.  Also... does that card work well for DOS?
        Thanks,
        Charlie Schumacher

Erm...why don't you record your frame rates, stick the card in, record your
new frame rates and tell us all?

I've been using a GameCard 3 for about a year, with three different
sound cards (AWE64 Value, Creative PCI and now TB Montego).  I don't
*think* it's improved framerate performance, but I've never really
tried to measure it for sure.  However, IMO it seems to provide a
little better stability and control with my TSW than the soundcard
ports have, and with the Gravis Firebird2 joystick that I use when I'm
playing MechWarrior stuff (which is much less often, now that I have
the combo of GPL and F1RS).

As far as hassles of installation go, it really seems to depend on the
soundcard gameport that you're trying to disable.  The TB Montego was
the only one of the three that I can recalll actually documenting how
to disable the soundcard gameport, so that one was real easy.

If you got it for free and don't mind spending a little time with
Device Manager (Mangler), then give it a shot.  It works fine on my
system:
PII 300 (Dell Dimension XPS D300)
64MB RAM
Turtle Beach Montego soundcard
Orchid R3D-II 12MB card
Matrox Millennium II AGP videocard
CH GameCard3 dedicated gamecard
TSW wheel/pedals on dual brake/throttle axis
Win95 with DirectX 6 (dx6eng.exe)

============================
Dave Mack

(remove "nospamfor_" for correspondence)

I still might.  I already had it when I got the Montego, and I got
that because I couldn't get either of the F1RS 3D soundpatches to work
right for me on the Creative PCI card.  They don't work so well on the
Montego card IMO either, but that may be due more to the customized
engine and downshift files and Bnk_1.bnm file I'm using.  So, I'd
decided to not use either of those patches.

Sorry to stray offtopic...

I don't think the Montego port is necessarily bad, it's just that I
already had the GameCard3 and wanted to keep using it; it seemed to be
a little more accurate than the Montego port, but I don't think it was
really all that noticeable; and I don't need the extra expansion space
right now for anything else, so there's no penaly IMO to use it on my
current configuration.

If it turns out that if I need to put in a PCI card that will bump
into the GameCard in its ISA slot, then I'll probably pull the
GameCard and re-enable the Montego gameport.  That may happen with the
V2 SLI configuration that I'll probably (hopefully) be putting in this
weekend, for example.

Yes, works fine in DOS.  I'm using it there with N2 (50th Anniversary
Edition with the 3Dfx patch included).
============================
Dave Mack

(remove "nospamfor_" for correspondence)