Chris Merchant

For those of you who are either having problems with ME size wise, and would like to reduce the bloat, and who are also reasonably 'puter literate....checkout http://www.98lite.net I've been using it for over 12 months with win98 and it improves stability and performance, and removes all those stupid, stupid apps that ms think you really must have running all the time.

All the reviews I read of ME said that it runs 3d games about the same or slower than 98 SE, but takes up heaps of extra HD space.

According to the above statement about firewalls I'm now assuming Charles is using UDP datagrams? Certainly bad for firewalls, and worse for bad ping/multi hop games. Could I *please* be corrected here by an official type person?

Steve, I'd be interested to know what kind of pings you were getting and how many hops you were from each other? I assume you played via the same ISP? What will happen to games in "real world" situations though? Thanks for your time.

UDP or TCP datagrams?

I would like to see the addition of something similar to ASL's "unknown kill" rule - where the tank may not be visibly affected by a near miss or deflection, but inside the crew are stunned, shocked or in a state of panic etc..and to all intents and purposes the vehicle appears to be dead to the outside world. But after a period of time there would be a chance that the tank would either magically come to life as the crew come to their senses, or suddenly be abandoned by a now broken crew... or perhaps continue to sit there longer.

Asus geforce 2 gts here.. upgraded to the 6.18 drivers without incident. According to the techhie sites, it appears the major benefits (eg higher fps) of the new drivers will only be realised by geforce 2 cards in high resolutions and 32 bit colour. That doesn't really apply to this game.

CM2+ ? Are you going to announce CM3 shortly ?

Another purple box vet here..mainly play the HASL modules these days.

DON'T upgrade to 6.01 - word is that these drivers are considerably slower than previous leaks.

I initially used pc-100 no name, then changed to corsair.. but I don't think that's relevant to your problem. You can expect low 3d scores if you don't have the 4 in 1 drivers installed. I wonder if this may be another AGP related issue - when you have had the 4 in 1's installed - do 3d games play for a few seconds and then lock up? Can you be specific with what happens?

Check out the Bovington Tiger! I saw it in pieces a few years ago, but it's going to be operational in the future. Gotta get back there when it's up and running! http://www.tiger-tank.com/

Hmm... I'm running an Asus CUv4x, pIII 700, Asus geforce 2 gts and 128 mb mem and I get a 3d mark 2000 score of 5977 - something is definitely wrong with your setup. When you installed the 4 in 1 drivers, did you select TURBO mode?

I originally had some major problems with the game locking up withing a few minutes of playing the demo; without fail it would lock up, every time. I changed my AGP setting to 2x and my AGP Apeture size to 16 (default is 64) and I haven't had ANY problems for days now. If you don't have a 16MB setting I've heard that 256MB may work as well. These settings are adjusted in bios.

Generally, HD access of large files will be slower on fat 32 because the cluster size is only 4k - meaning that the drive will have access up to 8x more clusters to read the same file compared to fat16. Don't convert unless you are really running out of space. The major drawback with fat16 is cluster sizes once you go over 511 MB - they are MUCH larger than fat32, so if you have lots of little < 32k files on your HD they will take up heaps of space (eg minimum size of 16k or 32k even if the file itself is only 1k!) Other major issue is that FAT16 only supports up to 2048k partitions, meaning that if you have a large HD you'll have to make multiple partitions if you want to stick to FAT16. So if you've got a fast system with a large HD, stick with fat32 (which is normally installed by default I believe), but if you want better HD performance then FAT 16 is the way to go. Cheers, Chris

still got the demo..waiting for the tcp/ip patch (and comments here that it's solid) before I order the game.

Argh.. the dreaded sm56 You could try throttling it back to v34 which is generally more stable by popping +ms=v34 in control panel > modems > Motorola sm56 > Properties > connection > Advanced tab. If you're serious about connectivity however, chuck it out and get an external. Cheers, Chris

Adelaide here too.

Just wondering if BTS could confirm they will be using tcp datagrams instead of udp datagrams?

For BTS - regarding the TCP/IP feature. Will you be using udp or tcp packet delivery? Chris

To Thomas Davie: Quiet about the Coopers; that's South Australia's little secret Beers, Chris