First post, by poeee
- Rank
- Newbie
This project has been going on for too long! Time to get serious! I found myself spending a few nights playing with stuff, to have it not perform as I want and then pack it up for months.
Goal: to play Grand Prix 3.
GP3 was a massive part of my mid-to-late teens. I was heavily involved in both the racing and mod communities. Although the graphics at the time were rather lacklustre, it was and is still one of the best driving simulators.
Originally I was planning on building a setup from parts circa 2000. I ultimately want to set up a system as close to the one I had at the time, but for now the hunt for hardware can wait. I had a Celeron 850 mATX system with a TNT2 M64. I do have some PIII gear, but don't have a suitable WORKING graphics card from that era.
The main ingredient was the steering wheel. I had a Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback Wheel. It was brilliant, and held together well for years. I am talking hardcore use. It did eventually fall apart. It might take me a while to find one, but I need to get one of these wheels again! I did pick up a Logitech Momo Racing wheel at the local market for $2. It seems to be in good condition, but I haven't given it a good run yet.
The brilliant thing with this project is that GP3 only runs correctly in Win95/98/ME. As far as I remember it crashes when replaying hot laps and such in XP (presume the same in 2k). Once WinXP was released back in the day, I used a Win98SE and XP dual boot setup.
About two years ago I played with a plethora of old junk that I had laying around and didn’t have any luck. Surprisingly, I couldn’t get the Athlon XP system that I use in my shed for car manuals to even start Win98SE after installation. I also had issues with sound cards in another 2ghz Celeron box I had. I think I tried an old soundblaster live card I had laying around, but the system never gave me any love and the project was put aside! I might have been using more than 512mb RAM, so that may have been the issue. Can’t remember exactly.
Now we arrive at where I am currently. I found P4 3ghz and Gigabyte 8I865GME motherboard at an opp shop for few bucks, and used it to teach my 9yo son about computer components. As it was sitting on my kitchen table and running, I thought I’d revisit this project. I still had no luck. Although Windows 98SE installed fine, I couldn’t get GP3 to start! Not sure if it was the group of drivers I cobbled together for the motherboard. Even tried adding an AGP card. I was ready to chuck it in.
I had one more option, and luckily persevered.
Current successful (well for now at least) specs are.
AMD Athlon 64 2800+
Gigabyte K8NS rev1.1 (nForce3)
1x 512mb DDR RAM
ATI Radian 9550SE
40gb Maxtor Fireball 3 IDE
I was relying on my previous experience from back in the day. It’s not as easy as I thought it would be, trying to use old worn out hardware or hardware that was never intended to be compatible with Windows 98. It’s only now that I’ve found this forum after all this screwing around, thanks to watching some of PhilsComputerLab’s YouTube videos last night. Those videos and these forums have also confirmed that maybe I’m heading in the right direction with hardware, as this motherboard supports SATA which will allow me to use modern SSDs (hopefully with Win98SE), and the Windows 98 drivers have been easy enough to find.
Next step is to attempt to get my wheel to work!
