JohnMid

Every home should have one. That's superb.

reinstall the mod(s)

Looks like your ukdirt installation is spadged. Reinstall, or see if someone can send you their ui.res file from their ukdirtf1 folder over msn or whatever.

they're no longer on boomtown, I think, so I guess that has/had something to do with it.

I haven't used an installation CD for a graphics card in years. Go to the website of whoever made your card and download the software from there, if you don't want to use generic nvidia drivers. When you've downloaded the software/drivers, just run the setup and see if that'll update your drivers for you. If not, you can choose to update the drivers for your graphics card from the display properties.

Could be a problem with the graphics card. try older drivers, try reinstalling directX, try seeing if there's a way of checking the temperature of the card (not the mian CPU in the computer). Check all cards, memory etc are properly seated in their connectors, check there are no rogue screws rattling around on the motherboard I have the same monitor, by the way, though it's unlikely to factor in the problems.

You need the vb6 runtime files.

Other BT based ISPs should be doing something similar. I just read this morning on The Register, that Plusnet (my ISP) are going to trial speeds up to 8mb with free upgrades (need to check the small print, maybe on transfer limits etc). I'd expect others to follow suit- it's something to do with the way BT operates the underlying service.

Having any kind of data other than the game transferring is going to affect your ping, and therefore your race (and that of other drivers near to you). If your typical ping is 50, that means you should be sending/receiving data from the server 20 times per second. If your maximum virtual speed at the end of the straight is 70mph, that equals 31.286 metres per second. If one of those twenty messages is interrupted, your virtual car will have travelled 3 virtual meters without the server knowing what to do (normally it's 1.5 virtual meters, but the server just missed a message). If the server can only get 2.5 messages from your client per second (because your ping is 400), that's potentially 12.5144 virtual meters between messages at 70 vmph (virtual mph). So the server has to use some kind of prediction, and it seem to me that that prediction mainly involves taking your current direction and speed (vector and velocity) and factoring in what way your wheels are pointed/what impacts should have been calculated from contact. It all adds up to a horrible mess on a short oval contact formula- on the big ovals, that kind of prediction is probably little different to where the car would be anyway, as there's not much in the way of sudden direction changes on a superspeedway. Having any kind of other internet service running spells trouble- most game data and instant messaging data uses UDP for the main part, which has a lower priority than TCP. So UDP packets fight for a place in the queue (your race vs MSN downstairs) then something sends a TCP packet and all the UDP packets get hit with a large cricket bat and knocked into oblivion. By the time the queue has settled, or the next packet got through to the server, you've warped five other people into the dog track at Coventry.

Claim: The characters on the British TV cartoon series Captain Pugwash had names that were sexual double entendres. Status: False. Origins: The Captain Pugwash Captain Pugwash cartoon, which originally ran on the BBC between 1958 and 1967, is widely believed to have featured characters with risqué maritime names such as Master Bates, Seaman Staines, and Roger the Cabin Boy. In fact, the crew of the famous Black Pig ship included sailors with no such names: present on board were Master Mate, Tom the Cabin Boy, and Pirates Barnabas and Willy. (No character with the designation of 'Seaman' appeared in the show.) Series creator John Ryan successfully won retractions and settlements from the Sunday Correspondent and the Guardian after both newspapers claimed that the show's characters did indeed have smutty names, and that the BBC had taken it off the air as a result. The Guardian's statement ran as follows: In the Young Guardian of September 13 [1991] we stated that the Captain Pugwash cartoon series featured characters called Seaman Staines and Master Bates, and for that reason the series had never been repeated by the BBC. We accept that it is untrue that there ever were any such characters. Furthermore, the series continues to be shown on television and on video. We apologize to Mr. Ryan, the creator, writer and artist of the Captain Pugwash films and books. We have agreed to pay him damages and his legal costs. Evening Standard correspondent Victor Lewis-Smith wrote several years later: 'It'll never stand up in court,' I hear you cry, but stranger cases have flourished. I remember voicing much the same opinion a decade ago when John Ryan's solicitor threatened legal action against the newspaper I was then working for, after I had erroneously (and I stress erroneously) suggested that the characters he'd created for his Captain Pugwash series weren't quite as innocent as they'd first seemed back in the 1950s. Unwittingly repeating a folk myth that had been passed down through generations of schoolboys, I'd stated that the dramatis personae included such nautical naughties as Master Bates, Seaman Stains and Roger the Cabin Boy, and that 'Pugwash' was Australian slang for a form of oral sex. The matter seemed trivial, but an apology was made, Mr Ryan's honour was satisfied and two sets of parasitical, low-life libel lawyers thus pocketed yet more easy (and thoroughly ill-deserved) dosh. Puns that play on the homophony of masturbates-Master Bates and seamen-semen are quite old (recall the "What's long and hard and filled with seamen?" joke), and it was probably only a matter of time before someone made the obvious jokes about the names of sailors in a long-running television series, especially since � as with the sexual messages allegedly hidden in several Disney animated films � people seem to find this type of humor particularly titillating when it is ascribed to the creators of children's programming. However, as this audio clip demonstrates, the exact pronunciation of certain Captain Pugwash character names could (perhaps deliberately) be difficult to discern. The British comedy duo of Victor Lewis-Smith and Paul Sparks has claimed credit for starting and spreading the Captain Pugwash rumors, and the double entendre names have also been attributed to a sketch by "seventies folkie comic" Richard Digance as well as a "1970s rag mag." Funnily enough, it was Victor Lewis-Smith's TV Offal that showed the Rainbow piece (which was all done for a joke, by the way).

They have those in Focus, I think for about 70-80 quid. "Monaco" or something they're called.

Do AOL still insist that you use their bloatware, or can you just get a login name, password, and set up your own connection in windows? It sounds like there was an AOL update that broke something, or didn't install properly and that's what's killed your online gaming.

Did you try disabling your firewall(s)? If you have XP SP2, you may well have two firewalls running (Windows default and Zonealarm). Is the phone line plugged in?

My personal theory is that the mini launcher has the c:\program files path hardcoded into it or something, given that my windows is on D: that may be a problem- the only thing I can think of anyway. If it works out the box, that's great, if not, it only takes a download of the regular mod launcher to fix.

Well, I cleared out my Heat install (all 2.3gb of it ) flushed the registry of anything related to hasbro, rebooted and installed the Nascar Heat Essentials kit and the hot rods mod. Mod worked fine first time, though the cut-down mod launcher that comes with the essentials pack refuses to recognise any mods (I dragged ukdirtf1 and vtab back off the backup dvd). The good news, though, is that the regular mod launcher works fine, though you'd have to be careful not to select cup 2000. The essentials pack is only 23mb, so it's a good package to keep as a backp if nothing else, especially as it patches everything you need up to 1.80. Not sure what patch ukdirt currently runs on, but I've downgraded before without any obvious problems.

Well, if I did it right, I'm paid up for 2005, so I should be online. Between hardware trouble, forum confusion and shiny objects, I got distracted from UK Dirt for the last couple of months or so.

I agree- the easiest way to check is to temporarily disable your firewall and see if it works (don't worry, it's very unlikely anybody's going to smuggle WMDs onto your computer in the meantime). If that works, then follow the instructions for whatever firewall app you run, or check the ports you've got open if you have a fancy router thingamajig.

Hello, gang, long time no blether. Hard working Heat modder TheMask (he made the mod launcher most of us use to fire up our games) posted on RSC to bring attention to an all in one free download to enable people to play Heat mods http://www.themodsquad.uni.cc/modules.php?...ewtopic&t=12#72 Is the statement on the modsquad forums with the download link. The package uses some files from the heat demo, and re-packages them, with all the patches etc, up to version 1.80. As it states, you won't be able to play the original game, but all mods should work fine. I think I'll backup my heat install to a dvd-r (it might just fit ) and install this, I'll report back how it goes. Seems like a good time to clear out the old installation fresh for a new season anyway Wouldn't it be fantastic if people could be offered a single download/cd with *everything* they need to go racing in stocks, hotrods, bangers right off the UK Dirt site?