Here's an interesting tidbit that's caused me a little confusion, and may be
the source of difficulty for some of you as well:
In tweaking F1 2001, I have my editor set-up to open all the editable files
at once in a single session (incidentally, there's an amazing 152 of them on
my machine). Recently, I made some changes to FFB settings in the PLR file
and noticed no impact from the changes. Thinking that perhaps I didn't save
my changes, I reopened my editor only to find the changes that I made were,
in fact, in the file. Strange.
After a little digging, here's what I discovered:
When F1 2001 installs, it creates application shortcuts (desktop icons
and/or start menu entries) that have property settings like this:
Target:
"C:\Program Files\EA SPORTS\F1 2001\f1_2001.exe"
Start in:
C:\PROGRA~1\EASPOR~1\F12001~1
Notice that it uses the old DOS 8.3 naming convention for the "Start in"
directory.
Before I make manual changes that I think may have a disastrous effect, I'll
make a copy of the entire "F1 2001" directory. If the changes do have a bad,
broad effect, I'll recover by renaming the folder from "F1 2001" to
something like "F1 2001 - Do Not Use," and then renaming the copy from "Copy
of F1 2001" to "F1 2001" to put things back as they were.
The problem is that F1 2001 continues to read and write to the files in
original folder (which is now named "F1 2001 - Do Not Use"), while future
manual editing changes are made to the file in "F1 2001." This is caused by
the use of the DOS naming convention as the "Start in" entry in the
application's shortcuts.
Fix: Change the DOS entry in your shortcuts to the proper Windows entry. If
your entries are the same as mine, you would change
"C:\PROGRA~1\EASPOR~1\F12001~1" to "C:\Program Files\EA SPORTS\F1 2001\" in
the "Start in" field. By the way, F1 2001 uses this same naming approach for
all it's shortcuts, so it probably makes sense to change the others as well.
If you're a little uncomfortable editing shortcuts, make copies of the
originals before making changes.
Hope this helps you avoid some headaches.
Jack Rambo
