On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 21:03:44 +0200 David Baron <d_baron@012.net.il> wrote: > > Simgear is the simulation library used by the "flightgear" flight > simulator and the "vamos" car race simulator. Neither of these will run > on my system. > > OK, it is "just" a PIII at 575mhz. The graphics card is an ATI mach64 > clunker. DRI is working. Vamos reports a 33 fps frame rate which should > play quite well. Other games doing more rendering, I believe, such as > "Tuxracer" play just fine on this hardware. > > What might be symptomatic: The sound in Vamos is intermittant. One hears > the "engine", then silence, then the sound again, then silence, once a > second or so. > > Is it simply impossible on this older hardware or may there be something > I can do to get simgear based games running? Tweaking X? Etc. I'm a bit confused by what you've written above. In your first paragraph, you say that Vamos won't run on your system; in the second, you say that it reports a 33 fps frame rate. So apparently it does run. So I'm not sure what the problem you're experiencing is. Similarly, you don't actually say what the problem you're experiencing with fgfs is. Won't start at all? Low framerates? (you can turn on the displaying of framerates through a menu option, or a setting in the properties browser) Decent framerates, but odd behavior of some kind? Help us help you, please. The only thing out of SimGear that Vamos uses are classes/methods for reading and processing XML files. So I don't think your problem is SimGear. Both Vamos and fgfs depend on plib. Recent patches to plib available in its CVS dramatically improve the framerates one gets out of fgfs. Be aware, though, that if you switch to CVS plib, you're going to also have to download CVS OpenAL, SimGear, and FlightGear, and build local versions. The stuttering sound issue you describe sometimes happens with FlightGear when it expects a more recent version of OpenAL than is installed. That shouldn't happen with the Debian packages; but I use CVS so I dunno. I occasionally run into this effect when I've updated and rebuilt FlightGear from CVS; running off and updating/ rebuilding OpenAL makes it go away. That wouldn't explain your problem with Vamos, though; Vamos doesn't use OpenAL to my knowledge. Sadly, for fgfs, a P3-575 with an ATI mach64 is not going to give you very good performance. I have an Athlon XP 2000+; I had a Matrox G550 32MB and was lucky to get 6 fps flying near the default area. Switching to an nVidia GF4 Ti4600 (the sexy card from 2 years ago, now available quite reasonably on ebay), plus the patches mentioned earlier, boosted that to about 30. -c -- Chris Metzler cmetzler@speakeasy.snip-me.net (remove "snip-me." to email) "As a child I understood how to give; I have forgotten this grace since I have become civilized." - Chief Luther Standing Bear
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