Win95 with ICR2/NASCAR/F1GP etc

Much to my shame, I'm thinking of buying Win95. Does anybody have experience of how ell it copes with our beloved Racing simms? Is it a case of booting back to DOS to run them, or do then run seamlessly under Win95 (I have my doubts!) Thanks. --

> Much to my shame, I'm thinking of buying Win95. Does anybody have experience > of how ell it copes with our beloved Racing simms? Is it a case of > booting back to DOS to run them, or do then run seamlessly under Win95 > (I have my doubts!) Hey Andy, I tried that and it is a pain in the butt. It's best to run these sim's from dos. I found when you set-up an icon to run NAS/INDY, the computer will reboot and start your game automatically. The way this works is WIN95 edits your autoexec and adds the startup command to the game you want to play, to the end of the autoexec.bat file. So when it reboots the computer will start your game. BUT, and a big BUTT, if your game crashes (which they do alot in WIN95) and you have to restart the computer via the reset button or on/off switch, it will start your game again, automatically. A continuous loop if you keep resetting. You will never be able to get to dos or windows. The way it's supposed to work is, when you finish your game and exit it normally, WIN95 will re-edit your autoexec.bat back to normal, reboot, and start up normally. If you reboot with reset button (in the game), WIN95 doesn't have a chance to change your autoexec back to normal. The only way to fix this is reboot from floppy and delete autexec.bat and rename your backup copy of it to autoexec.bat. Other than that, I like WIN95 better than 3.1.

: Much to my shame, I'm thinking of buying Win95. Does anybody have experience : of how ell it copes with our beloved Racing simms? Is it a case of : booting back to DOS to run them, or do then run seamlessly under Win95 : (I have my doubts!) There has been some mixed results on this one. However, in June Papyrus promises an upgraded ICR2 for Win95 that should take care of part of the problem. However, for NASCAR & ICR2 I have found that you will need at least 16meg to get them to work in Win95. I still don't recommend it though. It's best to "shutdown" to MS-Dos to run them. You shouldn't have any trouble running them if you restart Win95 in Dos mode. Even trying to run them in MS-DOS I ran into problems since I am using DriveSpace3. I didn't have enough memory to run them until I created a boot disk which didn't load the DriveSpace drivers/bin file. Once I upgraded to 16meg memory, I no longer have this problem. -- **************************** Michael E. Carver ************************* Upside out, or inside down...False alarm the only game in town. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=<[ /./. [- < ]>=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

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>Subject: Re: Win95 with ICR2/NASCAR/F1GP etc >Date: Fri, 12 Apr 1996 23:54:38 -0700 >> Much to my shame, I'm thinking of buying Win95. Does anybody have experience >> of how ell it copes with our beloved Racing simms? Is it a case of >> booting back to DOS to run them, or do then run seamlessly under Win95 >> (I have my doubts!) >Hey Andy, I tried that and it is a pain in the butt. It's best to run these >sim's from dos.

This is a big problem for a lot of people but you can run F1GP/WC, Indycar2, and Nascar in a win95 shell, and they run perfectly, I'm doing it now. I am having trouble getting NFS to run as well under win95 but it will run. The key is having enough conventional memory. There is a dilemma, if you have realmode (dos) drivers loaded in config.sys/autoexec.bat you can't get enough conventional in win95. The trick is to use "all" virtual mode drivers for win95 with ideally nothing in config.sys/autoexec.bat, I currently have 612K of conventional in a win95 shell. Then for the few applications that will only run in dos create a custom config.sys/autoexec.bat for each program by going: right clicking on the icon, then Properties/Program/Advanced, and then write in whatevers required. I am including an excellent article I came across in the Win95 online magizine written by Mark Hettler that I found very usefull. by Mark Hettler When I was considering upgrading to Windows 95, I had only one motivation: context switching. With four kids, someone was always playing a game on the computer when I needed to check a budget balance in my home finance program or dash off a quick e-mail note, and since most of their games couldn't be played in command windows under Windows 3.x, they were always out in DOS. So I had to either wait until later or make them quit in the middle of a game. With Windows 95, which was supposed to run all the DOS apps that you couldn't run under the old Windows, I wouldn't have to do either. I could just ask them to stop for a minute, switch back to Windows and do what I needed to do, then let them pick up where they left off. Imagine my dismay, then, when my neighbors told me they had upgraded to Windows 95, and they had to use boot disks for all their DOS games. Of course, we know now that that's not true. Check out Vernon Crandall's article, What Do I Do With All My DOS Games, in last month's issue, to learn how to set up icons to get you into DOS mode from within Windows 95. But while doing things Vernon's way saves my kids the hassles of fooling around with boot disks, it still doesn't give me context switching. The computer restarts in DOS mode, devoting all the resources of the computer to a single DOS session, with no option to switch out. What I really need to do is run those games from a Command Window within Windows 95, without restarting in DOS mode. I'd say about a third to a half of the DOS multimedia games at our house require DOS mode. You can tell a program that requires DOS mode because when you start it from within Windows 95, it displays a message saying it requires DOS mode. There's not much you can do about these except what Vernon told you to do last month. The rest are perfectly happy to run in a regular command window within Windows 95, but require varying combinations of extended memory (XMS), expanded memory (EMS), and real memory. I found I could configure my system so some games would work, but others wouldn't, and if I fixed it so those that weren't working would now work, the ones that used to work wouldn't. So I want to talk a little about how I resolved these issues. When I upgraded to Windows 95, my CONFIG.SYS file included the following two lines: DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE NOEMS I=E000-EFFF The first line was added by Windows 3.1 setup and makes XMS memory available. Without it, no matter how much memory you had in your system, you would only be able to access 640 KB and Windows wouldn't run. The second line was added by MemMaker. It loads an EMS memory manager, but the NOEMS parameter tells it not to load any EMS memory. Instead, it allows you to load certain device drivers, and DOS itself, into upper memory, freeing up as much of the lower 640 KB as possible for memory-hungry DOS programs. MemMaker does this by putting statements like DOS=HIGH, DOS=UMB and DEVICEHIGH= into CONFIG.SYS, and LH(LoadHigh) into AUTOEXEC.BAT. This gives you all the real memory your DOS programs are likely to need, with all your memory above 1 MB (i.e., 7 MB on an 8 MB system, 15 MB on a 16 MB system, etc.) accessible as XMS memory. That should be enough for anything, right? Wrong! A lot of your DOS games don't like XMS, they want EMS. Taking the NOEMS parameter out of the EMM386.EXE statement, and replacing it with a RAM parameter will solve that problem, but it's not the ideal configuration for Windows. So back when we were running Windows 3.x, we made boot disks for those kinds of games. When I first upgraded to Windows 95, I naively thought it would work like OS/2 Warp, and allow me to configure the memory allocation for each application, designating whatever amount I needed for real, for XMS, and for EMS, out of the total system memory. It didn't work. I found that if I had the NOEMS parameter in the EMM386.EXE statement in CONFIG.SYS, EMS would not be available to me at all. Taking the EMM386.EXE statement out of CONFIG.SYS altogether gave me the freedom to allocate EMS or XMS to individual applications as I pleased, but now drivers we being loaded into real memory instead of high memory at startup, and I didn't have enough real memory for some games. So I plugged in the EMM386.EXE statement from one of our boot disks: DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE RAM 6144 I=E000-EFFF This allocated 6 MB to EMS, which is the most any of our games wanted, and still freed up enough real memory. But because I only have a total of 8 MB in the system, I found that now the games that required XMS wouldn't work. At this point I thought I was going to have to decide which configuration would accommodate the most games, and relegate the rest to restarting in DOS mode. But after further experimenting, I hit upon the following syntax: DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE RAM=E000-EFFF This allows allocating XMS or EMS to individual apps, but still leaves enough real memory free. I'd recommend some variation of this syntax for anyone wanting to run DOS games under Windows 95. The memory range (E000-EFFF) may not be right for every system; you may have to experiment until you get one that's right for yours. But I've found that except for the games I referred to earlier that explicitly require DOS mode, I can run games that require XMS memory, games that require EMS memory, and games that require lots of real memory, all from within Windows 95 without restarting the system. I can context switch whenever I want, the kids don't have to quit in the middle of games, and I don't to wait to do what I need to do. Life is good. Mark Hettler works for National Software Testing Laboratories (NSTL) in Conshohocken, PA. where he reviews software for the Software Digest Ratings Report. His main specialty is database software; he has authored a number of in-depth comparative evaluations of SQL servers, client-server development tools, and Windows databases. In his spare time he helps his four sons (ages 14, 12, 10, and 7) get home page at http://www.nstl.com. ?1

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>: Much to my shame, I'm thinking of buying Win95. Does anybody have experience >: of how ell it copes with our beloved Racing simms? Is it a case of >: booting back to DOS to run them, or do then run seamlessly under Win95 >: (I have my doubts!) >There has been some mixed results on this one. However, in June Papyrus >promises an upgraded ICR2 for Win95 that should take care of part of the >problem. However, for NASCAR & ICR2 I have found that you will need at >least 16meg to get them to work in Win95. I still don't recommend it >though. It's best to "shutdown" to MS-Dos to run them. You shouldn't >have any trouble running them if you restart Win95 in Dos mode. >Even trying to run them in MS-DOS I ran into problems since I am using >DriveSpace3. I didn't have enough memory to run them until I created a >boot disk which didn't load the DriveSpace drivers/bin file. Once I >upgraded to 16meg memory, I no longer have this problem. >-- >**************************** Michael E. Carver ************************* > Upside out, or inside down...False alarm the only game in town. >=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=<[ /./. [- < ]>=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

I run WIN95 on a Pentium 90 with 16MB RAM and have no problems running the above games. For best performance don't go into 95, you can boot to a DOS prompt at start up without loading the Windows drivers, in this way I can obtain 624K of base memory with all my sound card, CD drivers etc loaded high. Don't be shy of WIN95, it's an excellent product. -- Mike Moxon

>> Much to my shame, I'm thinking of buying Win95. Does anybody have experience >> of how ell it copes with our beloved Racing simms? Is it a case of >> booting back to DOS to run them, or do then run seamlessly under Win95 >> (I have my doubts!) Kelly, You must have an unusual setup if this happens to you. Windows95 allows you to have a unique autoexec.bat and config.sys for every program you want to run in dos mode. Right click the icon, select Properties | Program | Advanced | Specify a New MS Dos Configuration... then edit to your heart's content. With Win 95 you don't it isn't essential to have an autoexec.bat in your root directory. I installed IRC2 as recommended by the manual under Win95. It has run flawlessly and has never crashed. Whenever I exit my machine reboots straight back into Win95. Regards

>>> Much to my shame, I'm thinking of buying Win95. Does anybody have experience >>> of how ell it copes with our beloved Racing simms? Is it a case of >>> booting back to DOS to run them, or do then run seamlessly under Win95 >>> (I have my doubts!) F1GP runs flawlessly under Windows 95. It can be slightly tricky to try to free 600k+ in a DOS window but it is possible. You do NOT need to run it in DOS-Mode and can thus run some of the great utilities for this great game simultaneously in the background and just ALT-TAB them. If F1GP 2 will work very well under win95 is very doubtful though... -- _____ ________ __ __ __ |DM| _______ __ |_ \\ ____ \\ \ \ \\ \ ___ | ____ \\_\ \'96 \ \\ \\ \_ |/ \\ \/\/ \\ \ \_ \ \ \ \ __ \ \ \\ \\ _\ . \\ /\/\ \\ \ \ \ \ \ .\ \ \ \ _\ - \\ \__|\// \\ \ \\ \_|\\ \_\ \__|\\ \ \ \ |______/ \_____|\/\_\\ \_\\____\\__\\_____\\_\ |_| "668 : The Neighbour of the Beast"

<<Kelly, You must have an unusual setup if this happens to you. Windows95 allows you to have a unique autoexec.bat and config.sys for every program you want to run in dos mode. Right click the icon, select Properties | Program | Advanced | Specify a New MS Dos Configuration... then edit to your heart's content. With Win 95 you don't it isn't essential to have an autoexec.bat in your root directory.>> I'll second that!!! I took both my autoexec.bat and config.sys and hid them in my DOS directory rather than deleting them outright. I need a small Autoexec.bat to load GO95 for my Diamond Stealth64 2meg VRAM card (PCI bus) because, for some reason, the resolution under Windows won't come up properly unless I load it (I have about 3/4" of black screen off the left side... anyone know what's wrong?). I have the proper driver loaded in Win95 (had to search for it off the CD... Diamond Stealth64 VRAM PCI) and have the resolution set at 640x480. <<I installed IRC2 as recommended by the manual under Win95. It has run flawlessly and has never crashed. Whenever I exit my machine reboots straight back into Win95.>> I attempted to actually play ICR2 while in Win95. NFS plays just fine *in* Win95 (not DOS protected mode) but I play ICR, ICR2 and NASCAR Racing in DOS protected mode with a custom autoexec.bat and config.sys (the latter two in SVGA). I deleted my dosstart.bat, because I never actually shutdown to DOS, but I may create a new one because I just installed a new CD-Rom drive (Creative hex-speed) after mine went south. Nick _________________________________________________________________ #6 & #94 in the *real* quest for the Cup!!! My home away from home... http://users.aol.com/ntotoro/122895.htm _________________________________________________________________