Every once in a while I mention this There's a software title out there, still available if you hunt around the net, by the company that makes all those great NASCAR sim titles for PC, Papyrus. They actually did make a NASCAR Legends sim, for the '70 season, that I was told was pretty good, but the title I'm talking about is called Grand Prix Legends, or GPL GPL is a bit old now. It came out in '98. But don't let that fool you. The car physics are still some of the best around anywhere. The AI is devilishly clever, and you will probably not beat most of them until you gain some serious driving skills. The sim recreates the 1967 grand Prix season with only one or two concessions to game play (one is a track that was incredibly unpopular, Papyrus changed it to a much better venue, and another is that Cooper and Honda would not permit their names and logos to be used). You take the place of an extra driver for either AAR, BRM, Murasama (Honda), Coventry (Cooper), Lotus, Brabham, or Ferrari. Your team-mates will be the likes of Chris Amon, Jim Clark, Dan Gurney, "Black" Jack Brabham, and other racing greats, who actually competed in the '67 GP season. They drive up to their reputations:grin: The graphics with the title are very 1998, and the sim will require downloads to work with modern graphics cards and high-end fast PCs. I have a dialup and the downloads took about 20 minutes to enable me to play with my fast PC and up to date video card. 1280X1024 is supported with these downloads. Graphics and sound downloads that are simply stunning are available here http://gplea.racesimcentral.com/ Also, resources such as where to get GPL and where to download the graphics and speed fixes are here at the GPLEA website (I got mine from the Papyrus website, don't know if they still list it, but GPL has remained hugely popular with the racing sim community, even 5 years after it's release) The sim is hard. It is not a game. The difficulty turns many folks off, you simply cannot hop in and drive, they are 1200 lb cars with 400+ hp, precisely zero ground effects and aero, and hard tires. You will swap ends all the time until you learn how to drive such a touchy machine. JP Montoya was interveiwed and was quoted on his enthusiasm for GPL, as well as it's realism. Here's a pic of what the graphics can be like once you download new photo-realistic graphics updates (installing is dead simple, you just put the new downloaded folder in the car folder, no big deal security measures in GPL's code in this regard). New tracks are also available. The GPLEA (see link) is the prime source for these add-ons and updates. they do stellar work. here's the pic, 1967 AAR/Weslake Eagle: this was the car that propelled the last American driver, driving for his own company, in a car he built, to GP victory (Dan Gurney, Spa-Francorchamps, 1967) hope it's small enough. the other cars' graphics updates are no less appealing. the cockpits in the updates are beautiful as well.
In the cockpit of Michael Parke's Ferrari (he raced a '66 Ferrari in the '67 season in many races, this is a '66, the '67 Ferrari looks slightly different inside and out, you get both types with the downloads, not just a generic Ferrari). The hands and arms are pure 1998 GPL graphics, the rest of the cockpit is the GPLEA update. The track looks like an add-on track...Is it apparent I'm sort of a '60s F1 nut yet?:laugh:
Hmmm, I don't know. I've run it on Win95, WinME, and now WinXP with almost no troubles until I got to XP. Of course, I needed the patches for fast CPUs when I got ME, and I had a small problem or two with my controller in XP, but I solved those problems in under an hour and I'm by no means a computer guru. The problems mostly concerned how WinXP ran the controller software, funny, since it's an MS controller. It told me that my version of the software was not fully supported...but I have the lastest version of the software. Odd. Then GPL told me that Win NT didn't support some options I had chosen...a shortcoming of the programming, it thinks XP is NT, but once I took the time to sort it out, it was fine. Like I said, under an hour of tweaking various things, trying different settings and the like. The GPLEA forums are a good place to get advice and help if you get stuck with a problem you can't resolve, these guys are the true GPL nuts and will be able to solve almost any software/hardware issue you can run into.
