1. Install M25 Racer
2. Download the London Racer patch here: http://www.davilex.com/download.aspx?ID=31 then install it over the M25 Racer game
3. Open the M25 Racer folder and copy the spel.dat file to your desktop
4. Uninstall M25 Racer (as the London Racer patch breaks the menu)
5. Reinstall M25 Racer then copy the spel.dat file from your desktop to the M25 Racer folder, overwriting the copy that's there
6. The game should work!

Ice

I have merged these two similar topics and tidy things up a bit. Have a good day. 😎

Thanks for the link to these patches. I downloaded the London Racer patch, and I can now play it under XP.

I still have one problem though - I have completed league tournaments 1 and 2, but as soon as I enter league 3, the game gives a fatal error, and returns to the main menu.
The error appears in a windows dialog box titled 'Fout', and the error is also written into the file 'debug.txt' in the games directory as follows:-

[0] D:\Work\libraries\Dx3D\Tga.cpp[40] : TGA cannot be colormapped

This happens using either the original or patched versions of spel.dat
My game is called "London Racer" and I know that the same game was also sold as "M25 Racer". I wonder if the problem also occurs in the "M25 Racer" versions?

I realise this problem can probably only be answered by Davilex technical support, but I can't register my copy of the game on their website, as it is not on the registration list anymore, probably because it is so old. That means I can't send them an E-mail, or fill in any on-line form that they would respond to according to the rules on the website.

So, I'd be interested to know if anybody else has had the same problem with this game, or had any success with fixing it,
Thanks, benkid77

Ooh that doesn't sound good! I haven't played M25 Racer through enough to see what happens yet...

I did find out from Davilex the following technical information on London Racer/M25 Racer patching:

-------------
The reason that the London Racer patch breaks down M25, is that London
Racer is different than M25 Racer. The races are the same but the game
isn't.

Certain menu contents of M25 Racer, like logo's and or car images and
even code, have changed in London Racer. The patch is meant to work on
London Racer only.

In technical details, the changes made for XP were spel.dat and a number
of *.ini files. The ini files contain characters that are invalid on XP.
The character that creates the most problems is the ';' character. It
was used as a marker for comments, but also to separate data like
"engine=1,2,3;4;5". But according to XP it should be "engine=1,2,3,4,5".
And all comments were removed like ";// engine sound".

Spel.dat from London Racer should be compatible with M25, so your fix is
correct (We haven't even thought about that, good work).

But now the sad news... we don't support M25 Racer any longer, so no
official patches are going to be released for it. We are sorry.
---------------

So you could try searching through the various ini files to make sure there's no ; in case they are causing a problem. An easy way to do this is to find the London Racer install folder, right-click on it then choose "Search", enter *.ini in the "Search for files or folders named:" box and enter ; in the "Containing text:" box and see if any come up! Perhaps we can debug this for Davilex as I get the impression they are (a) very busy and (b) a small company!

If you'd like to contact Davilex, send e-mail to support@davilex.com - their replies will come from "Helpdesk Internationaal" but may take a while. As you're using London Racer and you have a specific error they might be interested to hear from you!

Ice

Hi Ice, and thanks for your quick reply.
I finally traced the problem down to a graphics object called L3Racer1.pcx, which is referenced in the file L2_anim.ini.
This file is only used only for tournament league 3.
When I replace all occurences of the string L3Racer1.pcx in that file with the string L3Racer2.pcx, the fatal error no longer occurs, but graphics for a couple of the cars are screwed up, and this slows the game down.

So, I later found a better solution which was to replace the references in L2_anim.ini of two of the league 3 opponent car graphics with corresponding cars from league 2, this makes the game completely playable in League 3 again and I should now be able to complete the game.

Of course this is just a temporary workaround, as two of the opponent's cars (The Lotus and Mclaren) now appear as different models (an Aston and tvr respectively). Still, at least this is better than not being able to play the league at all.

I attach my modified file L2_anim.ini - if anybody else has the problem replace this file in your game installation directory with the attached file (back up the original file first) and at least you should in theory be able to complete the game (I haven't completed it yet though) Obviously it goes without saying that you should not use this file unless you have a problem with the game crashing in league 3.

Ideally, I would have liked to look at fixing the game graphics file L3Racer1.pcx instead, but this does not exist as a seperate file. It appears that a large number of the game graphics are archived in a large single-part file called rcs.img. I believe that's where the root cause of the problem really lies, but I have no knowledge of that file's format. (I used sysinternals filemon utility to determine that rcs.img was accessed immediatly after L2_anim.ini was read in. Also rcs.img was the last file read before spel.dat crashed)

Also, I have checked that none of my game files are corrupt by re-installing off the CD again, and checking my hard drive, and re-scanning for viruses - just to eliminate those possibilities. It always worked fine for me under win9x, and my CD still reads perfectly.

Anyway, I will contact Davilex using the e-mail address above and let them know of my findings.

Cheers and thanks again for your help, benkid77

Just to confirm, I've now managed to complete the game using the above modified file. There were no further problems. Now I'm going to play Europe racer, and see if that works ok with the new patch.

As for Europe racer, well the first two races work fine for me, but the third race "Paris Chase" crashes the game well into the race with another 'Fout' error as follows

[0] D:\Europa Racer\Code\LibSource\SCIPIO\Dx3D\text.cpp(887) : D3DError get texturehandle : unidentified error

I'm using a Geforce FX5600 with forceware drivers 66.93, and the game has been patched.
I've found that using compatibility modes does not fix the problem.
Maybe trying different fixes with the application compatibility toolkit could possibly solve this, but it just takes so long before the error happens, it would be quite tedious to attempt to fix it by trial and error in that way.
So I'm temporarily giving up on this one for the moment, as I'm going to play other games instead.

Still, I'd be interested to find out if others have had the same problems that I've been having with these games.

A little M25 Racer (in particular, NOT London Racer!) update. I started playing it today but got errors, so I updated all the .ini files to remove the lines starting with ;

The problems I think stem from some lines that had a ; comment in the same line after the value which caused the game to misread those lines.

So I present the totally unofficial M25 Racer patch! I have played through Tournament 1 level at least with this and it worked okay. I will update the patch later if necessary.

It contains: spel.dat from the London Racer XP patch and all the original .ini files with the ; comments removed, so there should be no problem in distributing this patch. After all, Davilex told me personally the don't support M25 Racer any more, as you can see above.

To use the patch, install the game then copy the contents of this zip file into the folder where you installed the game, overwriting the existing files.

Note: You may wish to run Settings once you have installed this patch and change some of the settings, for example Fog always looks bad in the game (on ATI Radeon 9800XT at least), breaking the alpha transparancy details (lights/shading).

benkid77 wrote:

As for Europe racer, well the first two races work fine for me, but the third race "Paris Chase" crashes the game well into the race with another 'Fout' error as follows...

I just played through the game and passed Paris Chase without problem (on Normal difficulty). I did get a couple of error messages exiting the previous race but that didn't affect the game.

I am using the original UK version with the patch from Davilex. It may also be worth considering the patch available for the Xplosiv budget re-release to see if that behaves any differently.

That's available here: http://support.empireinteractive.com/default. … BE-6EB0C4950839

Europe Racer does behave a little oddly though as all the normal road cars are crashing or upside-down when you arrive at them(!) and some of the graphics in the car repair/upgrade screens keep vanishing!

benkid77 wrote:

As for Europe racer, well the first two races work fine for me, but the third race "Paris Chase" crashes the game well into the […]
Show full quote

As for Europe racer, well the first two races work fine for me, but the third race "Paris Chase" crashes the game well into the race with another 'Fout' error as follows

[0] D:\Europa Racer\Code\LibSource\SCIPIO\Dx3D\text.cpp(887) : D3DError get texturehandle : unidentified error

I'm using a Geforce FX5600 with forceware drivers 66.93, and the game has been patched.
I've found that using compatibility modes does not fix the problem.
Maybe trying different fixes with the application compatibility toolkit could possibly solve this, but it just takes so long before the error happens, it would be quite tedious to attempt to fix it by trial and error in that way.
So I'm temporarily giving up on this one for the moment, as I'm going to play other games instead.

Still, I'd be interested to find out if others have had the same problems that I've been having with these games.

Turning off mip mapping seemed to fix it for me.

I was just playing Europe Racer, and the 3rd race Paris Chase gave me the same error, I went into options and set it to Low Resolution, then pressed the Advanced button, Put Texture detail to Minimum, and turned off MIP mapping, which allowed me to progress to race 4. After finishing the Standard Car Championship, I went back and turned the settings back to High Resolution, Maximum texture detail and turned on mip mapping, to see if it would crash at the same point* in a Quick Race(against cars instead of chase), which it did, so I changed the texture detail to Normal, tried again, crashed again, textures set to low, crashed again, textures back to high, turned off mipmapping, let me get to lap 2, maybe a fluke, raced it again, let me get to lap 2, so it seems turning off mipmapping for the Paris track fixes it.

*Up a hill towards a roundabout** just before the start/finish line.
**The Arc de Triomphe