A little over a month ago I got a new laptop to take to college. It is a Dell Inspiron 8200 with a 1.6 Ghz Pentium 4, 256 MB RAM, 32 MB video card (Geforce 2 or something like that), and I believe resolution up to 1600×1200 (though I keep it at 1024×768 so I can actually read stuff without squinting).
I have tried putting several of my flight sims on this new computer and some of them don’t seem to want to work right. Jane’s Israeli Air Force is one of my favorite games and it acts really weird. It installs just fine but when I get into the game and try to start clicking stuff it always messes up and then if I actually get to where I can fly the voices are all chopped up and it just doens’t work right at all.
Also, I can’t seem to get Jane’s F-15 to look good. It seems the 3Dfx stuff isn’t turned on or something yet the options tell me it is. I don’t really understand what the deal is.
Is my computer too fast? Can you have a computer that is too fast for a game? I mean I got Fighters Anthology working (though I’ll admit the opening videos and any of the videos in the reference section look kinda funny…..white stuff flickers while they are playing).
What is wrong? Is there anything I can do to fix any of this?
By: Arabella-Cox - 9th September 2002 at 05:43
RE: A Few Computer Questions
Now this is interesting, i know for a long time laptop have problems playing flight sims because the video card is not really a true video card, but i was surprised to find your 32MB card has such a problem. I remember my old PII300 have a problem running flight sims designed for 486s….nice laptop by the way.
By: PhantomII - 7th September 2002 at 02:18
RE: A Few Computer Questions
Well. I think the F-15 issue isn’t a problem anymore as I’ve found a replacement. I put Jane’s F/A-18 on here today and maxed everything out graphics wise and it looks great. It has the same general interface as F-15 and from what I’ve played I sure do enjoy it.
I love having all those hardpoints to put stuff on as well. 🙂
By: mixtec - 6th September 2002 at 19:49
RE: A Few Computer Questions
Theres a good chance you wont be able to run old Microsoft OSs on newer laptops, not even win2K, because they wont recognize newer drivers. Especially not Dell who is sold out on MS. You can get sony laptops for example configured to run win2K.
By: JJ - 6th September 2002 at 19:08
RE: A Few Computer Questions
WinXP may just tbe the problem you’re searching, PII. WinXP doesn’t support all games, and many old games may not run good and maybe not run at all. Also, I don’t see why you would have rpoblems with F-15. I don’t have a 3Dfx card and it looks fine.
By: PhantomII - 6th September 2002 at 18:39
RE: A Few Computer Questions
Under my system information page it says I have a Geforce 2 Go NVIDIA compatible (Dell Mobile).
Actually I didn’t really buy it extra, it came with my laptop. Mine was customized, but I got 10 extra GB of hard drive space free (for 40 GB total) as well as a free CD burner/DVD upgrade. In all this thing cost no more than 1700-1800 US dollars. A friend of mine who k nows a good bit more about computers said I got a very good deal.
I believe my video card is 32 MB.
As far as drivers go, I’d assume I have all the latest drivers. I’ve only had this thing for over a month.
Regarding gameplay I didn’t really buy it to play games. I just needed it for school and thought I’d try a game on it. Hopefully the new Strike Fighters: Project 1 flight sim will work as I plan on buying that.
One thing about Windows XP that irritates me is that it won’t let me install my Sidewinder Software so I can’t customize the buttons on my stick and if the game I’m trying to play doesn’t have that feature then I can’t have any customizing of my joystick.
By: Nikumba - 6th September 2002 at 07:17
RE: A Few Computer Questions
>Also, I can’t seem to get Jane’s F-15 to look good. It seems
>the 3Dfx stuff isn’t turned on or something yet the options
>tell me it is. I don’t really understand what the deal is.
3Dfx were effectivly bought out but nVidia, consquently the nVidia chips do not support 3dfx rendering, hence why your graphics look poor on F-15. The only way around this is to get what is called a “Glide Wrapper” this will enable your graphics chip to render 3dfx graphics and in theory makes it look pretty again. I have done this for Novalogics, F-16, F-22 and MiG-29
What operating system are you using?
Have you got the latest graphic card drivers from nVidia?
Nikumba
By: Geforce - 6th September 2002 at 06:24
RE: A Few Computer Questions
I’ll try to explain it very simple. A labtob is NOT made to play games, because the cooling-system can’t handle that much. I see you bought a Geforce 2 card, I guess you must have payed a lot for it, as the labtop-version is really expensive.
As for the two games, I had the same problem, especially with F-15. Maybe you should go to downloads.com and look for a patch. These games are leftovers from the 3Dfx-era, in the meanwhile, they went into banckrupty. Now everything is NVidia and Geforce.
Do you have a Geforce 2 MX or GTS? My brother bought a G-4 MX and it seems to work slower than my G-2 GTS.
Computers are never TOO fast, but after a while they are not compatible anymore with the old games.
Anyway, the only decent flightsim is Total Air War, already 4 years old.
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September 6, 2002 at 3:44 am