FMS Beta 7/Windows 2000/XP - Blue screen & Framerate

[sanjay]

I tried FMS Beta 7 on three of my machines:

1) Win2k server SP2, DirectX 8.0, NVidia Vanta 16MB graphics card, Athlon 800MB, 256MB RAM.
On this machine very often running FMS beta 7 causes a Blue screen of death.

2) WinXP, DirectX 8.1, ATI All in Wonder Pro graphics card, Athlon 800MB, 256MB RAM.
On this machine I cannot get more than 2 FPS using the standard fms.exe.
Using the debug_noflip.exe I get upto 38 FPS at 640x400 resolution and 25FPS at 1024x768 resolution but the colors and the graphics are weird. I get blocks as cursors and the color depth seems to be at best 8 bit.
Running in windowed mode the frame rate drops to 2 in most of the modes.

3) Win98 & Win2k dual boot, Laptop Dell Inspiron 7500, 500MHZ, ATI Graphics card.
With Win98 this combo works great for FMS beta 7. My Tx controller via the parallel port works fine, graphics is fine, frame rates are fine.

I hope the issues with win2k, and XP get resolved since I usually never boot win98 on the laptop but FMS is the only reason to do so now.

FMS rocks!

[emo]

I have the same experience with my setup - i.e. Win2K, DirectX 8.0, ATI All In Wonder Pro, 333 Mhz, 128Mb RAM. The FPS is no more then 2. Using Beta6 I could at full frame-rate. The graphics are very good, it's just going very slow.

However, I have dual-boot with Win98 - it behaves decent on Win98, but the planes fly much to fast! It's just like a rocket in their tale The sailplane flys great and realistic.

Great work!

[Stacey Family]

I have a similar set-up with 1GHz Athlon, ATI AIW 128 (not PRO!) on XP and it runs great with the new drivers from ATI that were released 30 Nov.

Previous display/utility drivers caused all sorts of errors and not just on FMS.....

Haven't managed to get the TX parallel interface to work yet so I just dual boot to W98SE but I'me working on it.

[sanjay]

I am really fed up with ATI.

The drivers for the AIW pro took nearly a year to appear on win2k and they were so buggy I could never use the TV card at all since it would lock up win2k har. I guess in 2004 sometime if the folks at ATI wake up we might see drivers that support XP well.

Glad FMS works in your XP config though. That is a positive sign.

[emo]

I totally agree with you, sanjay!
There has been nothing but problems with my ATI AiW-card since i "upgraded" from WinNT to Win2000. I've tried each and every driver released - all has problems. Now I'm changing machine and OS, to a 1800Mhz P4 on XP with a Nvidia MX 32MB-card. Hopefully this will be better...

And it's not only FMS that has problems, The CockpitMaster-sim is also behaving strange nowadays on my Win2000-partition. I think the problems started after I installed Servicepack 2 for Win2000....

[jp]

Stop wasting your time. Beleive me, FMS interfaces don't work with win2k or XP. We need the pic interface or FMS needs to support Win2k/XP port management.

[emo]

This was not a discussion about the interface, but the graphics card...

I am using Ken Hewitts eminent joystick-interface - works well on Win2K, WinNT and Win98. You find it on [url=http://www.rc-electronics.co.uk/index.htm.

I]http://www.rc-electronics.co.uk/index.htm.

I[/url] soldered together the serial-interface for FMS as well, but I prefer the joystick-interface since I can use it on all my setups.

[emo]

I have to withdraw all my complaints against my ATI-card. It turns out that it was Microsoft Netmeeting that totally screwed up my graphics...
I had activated Remote Desktop Sharing in Netmeeting since I am communicating with my remote office now and then. This function was on, even without Netmeeting beeing active. When I turned this off, suddenly both FMS and CockpitMaster behaved like before!
So now - on Win2000 and an ATI AllInWonder 128 (not PRO as I said earlier) I get a framerate of 14-20 with all graphics on, 32bits graphic and 1280x1024 resolution. Reducing to 16bit graphics gives me a framerate of 25-37! Not bad!
I am using the Win2000-ATI-drivers btw.

Happy flying!