Any one know how to get Nascar 4 to work with windows2K. I have downloaded microsoft service pack 2, compatibility patch, latest drivers for all hardware. I have a 2ghz proccessor, 64mb NVIDIA gforce video card. When i try to run the game nothing happens. When I go to my task manager nascar4.exe is using 100& of the proccessor. I must shut it down manually. I have spent hours on the phone with sierra tech support. They referred me to this site for help. If anyone can figure it I it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

1. What videocard?
2. What Drivers?
3. Install game.
4. Use default options. Try D3D or OGL.
5. Game works fine for me in 2k.

Video card is a NVIDIA Geforce 3 64MB
tried latest drivers from NVIDIA and from DELL neither changes anything. I uninstalled and reinstalled and still the same problem.

I am running N4 with no problems on my Win2k box.

Have you installed the latest BIOS for you motherboard?

I installed the latest bios from Dell. I noticed that DR Watson shows an error when Nascar4 was installed the very first time. It says "Application exception occured: Exception number c0000096 (privileged instruction)" Could this program log an error that keeps Nascar4.exe from starting and do I need to delete the error. Thank you

Couple of other things to try:

1) if you are running OpenGL change it to Direct3d and visa versa.
2) Run the graphics at the same resolution as your desktop
3) Try the forums at http://www.sportplanet.com/team-lightspeed

I tried all 3D settings. Could the problem be that my video card and sound card are on the same IRQ. I believe the are both on 16. If that could be the problem how do I fix it?

Win2k automatically assings all the IRQ's, they cannot be changed.

I haven't tried that game myself, but in addition to the suggestions you've already received, I'd also try to see if there's a "crack" for Nascar 4 out there. Every game these days it seems, are using C-Dilla "Safe"Disc to "protect" their CDs from ripping. (yeah, sure it works)

The downside of SafeDisc (aside from it not protecting anything at all) is that it's incompatible with a wide range of hardware. Early version of it wouldn't support Win2k and new versions have issues with certain CD drives, and stuff like that. (some Dell laptops will bluescreen if you install software from a SafeDisc "protected" CD under NT4)

Next, IRQ 16 doesn't exist. You're probably thinking of 15? IRQ sharing is not a big problem, and certainly not at the level you're seeing (a single process burning CPU is not an indicator of an IRQ problem).

100% CPU usage is normal with most games, so I wouldn't worry too much about it either.

What would be interesting to gauge OTOH is memory usage. Does the process gobble up memory faster than you can shake a stick at? E.g. "Need For Speed: PU" needs to have a tweaked pagefile size in order to work properly, otherwise it'll just sit there and eat memory while showing the "loading" screen.

Are you running any Anti-Virus software? Disable it and try again.

Also try lowering priority of the nascar process. I once managed to get Falcon4 to load faster when it's priority was bumped down a notch (this was during the Win2k beta, I suspect the disk cache was run at too low a priority and thus wasn't given CPU cycles at all).

Switching the game over to using OpenGL is probably an excellent idea as well (I realise it has already been suggested, but I think it's worth mentioning again). IMO, NVidia drivers have generally favoured OpenGL, both performance and feature wise.

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Rune

Thank you for your informative response. The CD Crack fixed it. Sierra has said they know there is a problem with SecuROM on their CD. They claim they will come out with a patch for it soon. Thank you again.

I'm glad you got it working, but I'm angered that it yet again proved to be the anti-piracy scheme that was the culprit.

I have a CD writer, but I don't pirate any games. The anti-piracy schemes that the game distributors are blindly using is a provocation that I'm very tempted to respond to. Maybe I should buy a stack of CD-Rs and make copies of all my "protected" CDs and give out to all my friends (and the odd passerby on the street). I can't tell you how tempting that would be. I doubt any court here (Norway) would convict me if I'm not doing it for profit.

BTW: When asked why Baldur's Gate II wasn't simultaneously released on DVD, the distributors response was that there weren't any decent copyprotection schemes available for DVDs yet... Result: I didn't buy a game that I had been looking forward to for a long time. Now there's finally a DVD version, but the Norwegian distributor didn't want to import it because it's now considered an old game, and everyone interested (after all) bought the regular CD-ROM based game! (no way am I going to buy a game that occupies more than two CDs! I'd much rather have a single DVD than having to swap discs until dawn!)

Grrr.

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Rune