JohnMid

"You can't start a fire sitting 'round crying over a broken heart". Google just kills these games stone dead.

And for next year, just change step five to suggest +1755 or 1756. This gives you a baseline of 250 from the current year. 5 x 50 is 250, conveniently, so when we added that in at the start, it basically meant the same as subtracting your birth year from 2004/2005. 2 x 50 x (number of pints per week) is basically just 100 x number of pints. In a three digit number, that means the first digit. There are only 7 days in a week so you can't have a four digit number. If you're over 100 years old, it doesn't work.

Ah right. I was going to say, the last time I saw a screen like that, it was because my VGA card came unseated from the board due to monitor cable wobble and lack of securing screws at the time.

What was it, then? It's always useful to know what the answer is in case anyone else gets the same problem.

Corny always used (uses? ) a joystick for racing. That should give you an idea.

Fantastic news given that there were plenty of signs telling anyone who dared to hold up a camera would get booted from the track. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.

You can get Geforce 6600 AGP with 128mb for about £90 online- there are Gigabyte and Leadtek cards for this price at scan.co.uk inc vat. There'll be some on ebuyer.com. By the time you've added postage, you'll still be under £100. Local shops, if anything like the one in Wakefield I looked in, will offer to charge you £200 for the same. I'm still on a ti4200 myself, but I'm looking at 6600 upwards- I don't see much point in paying out for a 5700/5900. I'm sure there are ATI cards in the price range you want that will also be very good for the money, but I know nothing about those cards as to which are the good ones.

SiS onboard graphics chip? Ouch. If in doubt, reinstall the ukdirtbangers mod. When does the game crash, exactly? At what point when trying to join a session?

The free space must be on the drive partition the game is installed on, also. Just in case you have a split drive, with maybe C: and D: (or E: ) drives.

Looks like some files are missing. Reinstalling the mod may fix?

I've personally had a mix of nascars and "mod" cars by referencing chassis that don't exist in the mod I was messing with. Not all one or the other. I'm sure there's a way of breaking the drivers.txt so that it's rejected completely, but it's not the only way to skin a cat.

If all the cars are Nascars, rather than just one or two from incorrect drivers.txt entries, it means you don't have any of the .car files in your ukdirtbangers(?) folder. Or the game doesn't think you do.

http://www.xp-drivers.com/drivers/79/79453.htm Might work, I haven't checked- my Sidewinder software is still installed from when Microsoft still supported the game controllers.

Even if everything else works, try reinstalling the ATI drivers, and DirectX (9c or whatever is the latest). It could be one file in DirectX that's broken, but if it only relates to dx7 stuff then you wouldn't know until you try to run an older game (like Nascar Heat).

The only thing I found not working with the Essentials (I uninstalled Nascar Heat completely to test it), was the mod selection thing. To get round it I use the Mod Launcher (available at the same site). I did make backups of the mods I had, but F1 and Rods I installed straight from downloads off the UKDirt site, so there's nothing missing at all from the Essentials pack.

Yes, there's a "dedicated server" option for Nascar Heat- that's how the Jolt server runs, after all. There's instructions on how to use it in your "Advanced.txt" file that will be sat somewhere in your Nascar Heat folder (what options etc to set up). The server should be happy on a PC with a lower spec than used for racing- it doesn't do any graphics or anything like that, it just sends and receives data from the racers' PCs and counts laps bascially. You should be able to host for about 10 people on a typical DSL connection. The guys who admin the Jolt server will know all the ins and outs of it.

It's not like the good old days of Windows 98 where you could look at the list and kill off almost all the processes- XP uses a lot of service processes running constantly just to stop everything collapsing. A lot of processes also hide under the name of svchost (it could be your internet connection, for example). Tread carefully, anyway.

I honestly don't remember- I'm sure at some point the game asked me if I was using a Voodoo/3dfx card, Direct3d or neither, and I picked the one I understood to mean software rendering (which means the 3d card doesn't actually do anything, in short). If it wasn't an option during installation, it must have been either in the game's main options menu somewhere, or else in a seperate video/graphics settings doodad.

I remember having trouble running SoD with 3d graphics switched on- I had to run it in "software" mode or else it would crash. Freddy would be the one to know, but as far as I'm aware, he washed his hands of it years ago.

You can download the Essentials pack from (I forget where). That has the files you need to get Heat mods working without a copy of Heat itself.

Well, that's always going to end in tears.

I'd be insterested to see the drivers.txt file contents also, given the errors coming up on that. It also looks like the .car files are missing, which suggests trying to join an online game using a different banger carset than everyone else- especially puzzling given that the BHCM doesn't move the .car files at all. It looks as if the banger mod isn't installed at all.

Vintage TransAm is probably my favourite non-oval mod for Heat. Nothing like blatting round Brands Hatch in a 'Cuda.

Memory should just slot in and out with the end clips holding it in place. The memory sticks themselves have slots cut into the bottom so you can't put them in back to front. The only real concern is don't wear a wooly jumper or synthetic leisurewear and make sure you've earthed yourself before handling anything with chips on it (not fish- that's fine). So find something metal to touch before you handle the expensive electronic things.

All BT based ADSL ISPs are changing to a "fair use" limit due to the new way they're charged for the capacity. So with plusnet now it's 30gb for downloads outside of "off peak" time (midnight to seven am or whatever). Of course, the good ISPs will be offering maximum possible line speeds along with this with no increase in sub cost (because it costs the same to them whether you're running at 512k or 8mb/sec). Plusnet haven't made any moves to that effect (boo hiss) but it doesn't all kick in outside of trial areas until September anyway. Any ISP charging fees to upgrade your line speed will be similarly extracting the micturate, because they won't particularly have to do anything to enable it.