GP2 Demo

Where can I download a demo of GP2? I want to try it

There is no such thing anymore. The GP2 demo exists (around Monza), but wow it must be at least 4years old now. For the price of GP2 (you should get it at maximum 15$ US), you won't regret it. -- -- Fran?ois Mnard <ymenard> -- May the Downforce be with you... "People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realise how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world."

I just threw one away. No Kidding. Good Lord, imagine someone wants to play that thing. Do yourself a favor and pick up ANY other GP Sim. That thing needed a 10000Mhz machine to run. A college course to navigate the menus. Had no support for Voodoo/D3D. If you went into a turn with a bunch of AI cars in view in front OR behind, the system came to an absolute crawl. It doesn't drop frames, just time. So when the system slows down, time stops. couldn't run it as well as Papyrus Nascar 1. Try F1RS. At least it works. Far nicer graphics. Needs less computer. Etc. >Where can I download a demo of GP2? >I want to try it

It's just like... still the best F1 sim even after all these years. And extremely customisable for anybody's needs. Obviously not, most of the Pentium 2 on the market can run it incredibly well in SVGA. A simple powerfull classic Pentium is well enough for it. You obviously have no knowledge of a tree-architecture menu. The GUi is excellent. Now that's simple-minded. Voodoo 1 chipset didn't exist when it was released. It would be like putting down Duke Nukem 3d because it doesn't support D3d or Glide. LOL nice try. Etc. Muahahaha. Now -that- is a bad title, but everybody knows this ;) -- -- Fran?ois Mnard <ymenard> -- May the Downforce be with you... "People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realise how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world."

:> That thing needed a 10000Mhz machine to run. : Obviously not, most of the Pentium 2 on the market can run it incredibly : well in SVGA. A simple powerfull classic Pentium is well enough for it. I still run it on a P166 notebook while commuting. It's the ultimate "portable" driving game precisely because it *doesn't* require 3D graphics to run. I can run it in VGA if I want all the cutesy textures, or I can run it sans-textures in SVGA at a very respectable framerate. After a few laps of solid racing, I don't even notice the lack of textures. Show me any other decent F1 sim from the last few years that will run at all on a low-end notebook. Maybe I'm a market of one, but it's important to me. The huge sales figures for GP2, and it's 3rd party support, tell me there are a lot of people out there with varying computer specs still enjoying this one. It has its flaws, but it's fun. On a decent computer (PII-300+) and some of the incredibly well made 3rd party tracks and menu pictures, this old sim takes on new life. Until GP3 comes along, I still think GP2 has the nicest looking 3D models of any F1 sim, and that's with a fairly low poly count. :> A college course to navigate the menus. : You obviously have no knowledge of a tree-architecture menu. The GUi is : excellent. I can zip up and down the menus faster than any other game. Then again, I liked the old Papy menu system as well. I could load up a setup and hit the tracks with a series of arrow key clicks which were burned into my muscle memory. Stephen

Try it? Buy it more like, and for only 4.99 from EB, you really can't go wrong!

> > Where can I download a demo of GP2? > > I want to try it > Try it? Buy it more like, and for only 4.99 from EB, you really can't go > wrong! He can if he's in Denmark. -- AG Remove removes from address to remove anti-spam measures. -- Never for me the lowered banner, never the last endeavour! (Damon Hill - 16th June 1999)

[This followup was posted to rec.autos.simulators and a copy was sent to the cited author.] Why? If not from EB he can still buy it on-line for the same price. -- Best regards, The Phoenix

>> I just threw one away. No Kidding. Good Lord, imagine someone wants to >> play that thing. >It's just like... still the best F1 sim even after all these years. And >extremely customisable for anybody's needs. Imho there still is no f1 sim which truly is a sim. I've got my hopes high for GP3... At the time when it came out, the system needed to run it in svga at 100% was way too high. I had a Pentium 133, quite advanced for it's time, and GP2 ran really choppy in svga mode. The biggest problem and fault of gp2 was/is the real-time problem. When it gets crowded, the framerate doesn't drop, everything just goes slower, removing all feeling of speed and driving. I installed it a couple of months ago on my PII-450, and finally I was able to run it in SVGA. Still the cpu usage wasn't at a constant 100%, even with all options on, I sometimes got 100%, sometimes 120%, again removing all feeling of speed and driving. Besides, GP2 really shows it age now. I do have this knowlegde, but I agree that the menu it quite clumbersome, not very user-friendly. Everytime I wanted to change an option, it costed me quite some keypresses to find it. True. A 3dfx patch would have been great for GP2... I never liked f1rs either, but it gave me more fun than gp2. GP2 was a real dissappointment for me. I loved GP1, played it lots of times, and won the championship on the highest level. GP2 had everything in it, but the slowmo problem spoiled it all for me. I really hope that GP3 doesn't have this fault. Andre

I used to run GP2 with my P-150, 32 megs of RAM with my 1 meg trident video card all day long.

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>I just threw one away. No Kidding. Good Lord, imagine someone wants to >play that thing. >Do yourself a favor and pick up ANY other GP Sim. That thing needed a >10000Mhz machine to run. A college course to navigate the menus. Had no >support for Voodoo/D3D. If you went into a turn with a bunch of AI cars in >view in front OR behind, the system came to an absolute crawl. It doesn't >drop frames, just time. So when the system slows down, time stops. >couldn't run it as well as Papyrus Nascar 1. >Try F1RS. At least it works. Far nicer graphics. Needs less computer.

Etc. >>Where can I download a demo of GP2? >>I want to try it

Well you have to be willing to turn down graphics detail (sky is the biggest fps killer), and/or turn down the framerate in order to get rid of the slow-mo completely. That's the only way to enjoy GP2 at it's best. 18 fps or so might sound awful, but keep in mind it's a steady 18 fps, no distracting fluctuations like you might expect from most games.

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>>> I just threw one away. No Kidding. Good Lord, imagine someone wants to >>> play that thing. >>It's just like... still the best F1 sim even after all these years. And >>extremely customisable for anybody's needs. >Imho there still is no f1 sim which truly is a sim. I've got my hopes >high for GP3... >>> That thing needed a 10000Mhz machine to run. >>Obviously not, most of the Pentium 2 on the market can run it incredibly >>well in SVGA. A simple powerfull classic Pentium is well enough for it. >At the time when it came out, the system needed to run it in svga at >100% was way too high. I had a Pentium 133, quite advanced for it's >time, and GP2 ran really choppy in svga mode. >The biggest problem and fault of gp2 was/is the real-time problem. >When it gets crowded, the framerate doesn't drop, everything just goes >slower, removing all feeling of speed and driving. >I installed it a couple of months ago on my PII-450, and finally I was >able to run it in SVGA. Still the cpu usage wasn't at a constant 100%, >even with all options on, I sometimes got 100%, sometimes 120%, again >removing all feeling of speed and driving. >Besides, GP2 really shows it age now. >>> A college course to navigate the menus. >>You obviously have no knowledge of a tree-architecture menu. The GUi is >>excellent. >I do have this knowlegde, but I agree that the menu it quite >clumbersome, not very user-friendly. Everytime I wanted to change an >option, it costed me quite some keypresses to find it. >>> Had no support for Voodoo/D3D. >>Now that's simple-minded. Voodoo 1 chipset didn't exist when it was >>released. It would be like putting down Duke Nukem 3d because it doesn't >>support D3d or Glide. LOL nice try. >True. A 3dfx patch would have been great for GP2... >>> Try F1RS. At least it works. Far nicer graphics. Needs less computer. >>Etc. >>Muahahaha. Now -that- is a bad title, but everybody knows this ;) >I never liked f1rs either, but it gave me more fun than gp2. >GP2 was a real dissappointment for me. I loved GP1, played it lots of >times, and won the championship on the highest level. GP2 had >everything in it, but the slowmo problem spoiled it all for me. >I really hope that GP3 doesn't have this fault. >Andre

Exactly. It's true it is still a hog to run at full detail, but that is the only compensation for this great piece of art. Incredible customisation. What other sim give you the possibility to re-act every F1 year since 20years ? There is patch everywhere for that. I can say that racing Gilles Villeneuve's Ferrari around Long Beach is a blast (especially since you can edit some power ratio to create old engine performances). OMG Steve we think the same way. Icr2 has for me the ultimate GUi (the Dos version). I could go anywhere using my keyboard, and darn I was incredibly fast for that!!! I miss keyboard-controlled graphical user interface today that's for sure. -- -- Fran?ois Mnard <ymenard> -- May the Downforce be with you... "People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realise how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world."

You are right here. There isn't one that gives full sensation of what Formula 1 really is. But I'll say that Gp2 is the one the closest at the moment. Yes, but it aged pretty well. It was the last of the non-3d batch of games. The real-time problem could be solved if you could get 25fps everywhere. Plus, I still say the SVGA graphics are the best I have ever seen. Very deep and sharp detail, nice color palette. But Voodoo cards did not exist/were not popular at all. Take Duke Nukem 3d as an analogy. Boy I agree they both would look great, but that's not a reason to not play them. We have to accept them as history softwares which pushed the limits of non-3d acceleration 8) My memory fails but didn't F1GP also suffer from the slomo problems, but nobody remembers because it ran very fast ? Not 100% here. I only raced F1GP with a 386 so it actually ran pretty well. -- -- Fran?ois Mnard <ymenard> -- May the Downforce be with you... "People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realise how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world."

I can also say that the new Hockenheimring layout is a total disaster. Not only by looking at the trackmap, but also by driving a few virtual laps around it after an hour work of trackediting. What sim has those possibilities? I honestly don't know. The BAD thing ofcourse, is that it's not very likely that GP3 will have the same options to customize the game (certainly not out of the box), and that's what made GP2 so great.

Where can we get the new (ouch I also can't imagine how big the changes are.. another scrapped track) Hockenheim track for GP2 ? Made some quick searches and it's impossible to find. The only one I can find is the short track, where some Touring Car and Sports Car race. I loved the old Hocke, it was a blast to see those cars with absolutely NO wing angle go full throttle in the woods, at incredible speeds. I was told that the sounds reverbs all around the forest, making an incredible feeling of "being at a F1 track", more than any F1 track on the circuit. Who knows ? When you develop more than 1 title you simply do not restart everything from scratch. You already have a big code base, why start from zero? The GPL game engine has roots from the old game engine also. Look at F1GP, it still has a file architecture the same as Gp2. And there is 6years between them. Geoff is still making most of the work by himself. From the look of the GP3 screenshots, you can see the roots from Gp2, so why would it be different for Gp3 ? ;) Same for Papyrus. The file architecture in all their titles (except SODA) is the same. Same .dat file with TRK's, 3do's, etc.. I say that it's normal things will be different, but after a year or so we will be able to make all we have done for Gp2. Let's hope so! -- -- Fran?ois Mnard <ymenard> -- May the Downforce be with you... "People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realise how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world."

I didn't announce it very big, as there is no CCline, but as you play with a wheel anyway, that doesn't make much difference. Find it at my homepage http://home.wanadoo.nl/~m.keizer/index.htm [address restored] Unfortunately, that hasn't been implemented in any game yet. But it will be, the only question is: will it be GPL2 GP4 Ubisoft-4? True, but Geoff announced in the interview that they want to make commercial annual updates. And that would mean that they have to put a stop to bvackwards-engineering, otherwise no-one will buy them. So they have to either 1) take legal action against trackmakers or editor-makers Seems pretty unlikely as there are so many ways to do something legal or underground. AFAIK, even if microprose wanted, there's not much THEY can do against GP2's hacking. Circuit owners though could claim copyright to their tracks (daytona had done that for N2, IIRC), but there are 100s of decayed tracks and 10000s of fantasy tracks. 2) scramble the fileformats. Don't forget, it took a LONG time to descramble the JAMfileformat. So this might be a good option.

Ymenard refered to Voodoo 1 not being out when GP2 was released. Well, I already had mine...... As to your asking for "any other" F1 Sim, Well, I don't have another "F1" sim but the old Indycar Racing II that supported rendition video was several years older than GP2 and needed exactly 1 million percent less computer to run. In rendition mode, the graphics were superior, and, yes, no smoke was in the mirrors when you spun the tires, but a full field of 32 cars could go into turn 1 at any track, playing multiplayer over a modem connection, with absolutely NO loss of framerate. IC-II was all road courses. Simply the single most "Ahead of it's time" game in all of sim racing history. Yea, lots of games are nicer now, but, none of them made advances in graphics without the cost in hardware to make them work. GP2 with it's Less than 1 Frame per second at monaco turn 1 is not something I care to waste my time on. It's a pity I wasted my money. I remember quite vividly when a racing friend told me to rush out and buy that peice of $%#%, since we were running the "OLD" Indycar II. I also considered IC2 better than Nascar 2. Simply because N2 was a buggy peice of Unpatched ____ right up till N3 was released. It's obvious they don't get money for patching the problems in software. Sierra doesn't give a Da^% if thier code works or not. They already got the money. Why fix anything to make it work. Well, now we have N3 and GPL to fix all this. For the poor souls who still use and "Old" pc, I would suggest the original Papy titles over any of the GP sims of the time. In closing, I would have to say it's a close contest for worst ever sim in my mind.... Gp2 or the original Monster Truck Madness... :) I'm CCing this the friend who moved away a few years ago and got me to Buy GP2. He's heard me *%^ch about it for years, and he also still plays the thing on rare occasions. He'll get a laugh out of this as well. Happy Racing. P.

I'll tell you guys what the really sad part is in all this. I use this newsgroup as a gauge for the quality of games before I go buy one. I just don't buy every title to find out if I like it. I did with N3 but the concensus was the N3 was awesome so I sprung the 50 bucks. The sad part is that when Gp3 comes out, it'll get rave reviews no matter how bad it is. I mean, if people will still defend something that defied time and space and call it a SIM, how am I to trust the opinions when it's successor comes out. GP3 will most likely break sales records simply because it replaces Gp2. I can see about 5 sales right here in this thread. I'll never buy another one of their titles without seeing it hands on first. Period. I can't afford the computers needed to play their games....

> I used to run GP2 with my P-150, 32 megs of RAM with my 1 >meg trident video card all day long. I'm sure it had presentation quality framerates too! How many frames per Minute did it provide?? :)

> > I can also say that the new Hockenheimring layout is a total disaster. Not

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> > only by looking at the trackmap, but also by driving a few virtual laps > > around it after an hour work of trackediting. What sim has those > > possibilities? I honestly don't know. > Where can we get the new (ouch I also can't imagine how big the changes > are.. another scrapped track) Hockenheim track for GP2 ? Made some quick > searches and it's impossible to find. The only one I can find is the

short > track, where some Touring Car and Sports Car race <megaschnip> Not what you're looking for, but you can try my version of it (which I built before the map was released - I just made up the corners between where the chicanes used to be) at http://ianhill.tripod.com I think it's probably not quite as bad as the real thing - there's a couple of fast corners there... </shameless plug> regards -- Please visit www.thehungersite.com today!

> > I just threw one away. No Kidding. Good Lord, imagine someone wants to > > play that thing. > It's just like... still the best F1 sim even after all these years. And > extremely customisable for anybody's needs. It WAS the best F1 sim, a couple of years ago. Who could forget the strange grasp of realtime in GP2? I think the menu system had way to many levels, 3 levels down and up to load a game or go to the garage. (ICR2's menu system is still unbeaten) I agree. Wow, did I just type that? ;^) Now THAT's just bullshit, and everybody knows that! ;^P -- l8er ronny Your mouse has moved. Windows must be restarted for the change to take effect. Reboot now? |\ _,,,---,,_ I want to die like my Grandfather, ZZZzz /,`.-'`' -. ;-;;,_ in his sleep. |,4- ) )-,_. ,\ ( `'-' Not like the people in his car, '---''(_/--' `-'\_) screaming their heads off!

> It WAS the best F1 sim, a couple of years ago. Pffff.. OF1R ? Psygnosis's new F1 game? Don't tell me MGPRS2 please ;) Ok Gp2 might look outdated compared to every other on the market, but it's still the best in how deep the gameplay is, how far you can push the customisation, and how fun the actual serious racing can be. Im not having fun racing the Ubisoft F1 sims, but heck pushing the GP2 car around Spa is still a blast. True flaw, I would agree. There was some little problem, but it is still better than most of the GUi for racing sims. Except Icr2, who has the best in all the games I have ever tried.(equal to N1 since it was the same menu structure). I agreed with your point about Icr2, but that's a fact. Icr2 had the "GPL game engine" of menu structure. Hehe. Would had still loved to see 3d implementation in those titles. Darn, I simply cannot counter-point what you wrote.. let me search.. hmm ;) Don't hold your breath on the new F1 "sim" by Ubisoft, still ;( -- -- Fran?ois Mnard <ymenard> -- May the Downforce be with you... "People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realise how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world."

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> [This followup was posted to rec.autos.simulators and a copy was sent to > the cited author.] > > > Try it? Buy it more like, and for only 4.99 from EB, you really can't go > > > wrong! > > He can if he's in Denmark. > Why? If not from EB he can still buy it on-line for the same price.

yeah,,with a 20 shipping fee or something... Shipping to and between European countries is still at a very high price level. -- Robert S?derberg If replying by mail,remove the word INGENSPAM from the adress.

Just because you don't like GP2 doesn't mean other's can not enjoy it. I enjoy it still, and believe me, there's nothing wrong with me. I think it comes down to the controller. ICR2 was almost implayable with keyboard, I couldn't enjoy it until I got the wheel. GP2 was and is still enjoyable for me.

> I just threw one away. No Kidding. Good Lord, imagine someone wants > to play that thing. "That thing" IMHO, is probably the *best* modern F1 sinm to date. No, I didn;t say it has the best graphics, cos it clearly doesn't, but it simulates F1 better than any other, and simulates physics better than most others too. Sure about that are you? What about F1 97! Johny Herberts GP! etc.... Really? sounds like your pc is not optimised for games. I first ran GP2 on a 486 dx4 100, (with most graphics options off, in vga mode) then on a K6 200 to really appreciate its svga graphics (but not at max fps), and now run it (yes, I still play GP2) on a Celeron 450 with 128Mb ram and it flies along with all options on in svga at max fps. No 1000MHz pc required here? I never had any problesm with the mynu's they seemed fairly logical to me? I don't remember the menu's being a major problem to many others either? Compare GP2's menu's to those in F1RS, which were so slow, and not really logical? But hey, thats just my opinion.... Erm, actually, GP2 was designed and released *Before* 3D graphics were available in games. You can hardly support a technology that doesn't exist when you make something. Once, again it depends on your pc, I have no slowdowns on my pc? The time lag problem is a well known GP2 problem for slower pc's only, it should not be a problem for any decent fast pc (that maintains 100% PO), and was only one solution to a particular programming problem. A solution that is generally not used in modern games/sims today. > TNT 2 couldn't run it as well as Papyrus Nascar 1. This sounds like the real issue here? You simply don't like GP2. Fine, you are entitled to your opinion. But if you are going to criticize something, at least try to use accurate, constructive, criticism, not this inaccurate ranting. GP2 works, very nicely actually. Well, a game produced in the 3D era would have nicer graphics wouldn't it. I like F1RS too, great game/sim. Really? try running F1RS on that 486 dx4 100, or the K6 200 and see how good it runs? You need a decent fast pc to run *any* good program/game/sim nowadays. 8-) *Peter* - http://www.cix.co.uk/~peterpc/home.html