=latest update: Aug 25th 2007=

I thought Id start an infomercial on graphics so that we are all on the same page when talking about graphics tweaking. Why this is important? Because when we use WRAPPERs vertical synch mode tied to the monitor's refresh rate (60 or 75hz or whatever); we need to keep our systems in close synch if we want to minimize multiplayer jitter or warping. There are a few contributing factors such as: Game graphics, Monitor, Vcard, wrapper, Windows and its adaptor configuration that make a difference.

BUT...
BEFORE I GO ON, HERES A LINK TO POSTIVE G'S MOST EXCELLENT SITE ON HOW TO SET UP LB2 FOR WINDOWS SYSTEMS.
Link to Positve G\'s LB2 Setup Site

AND...
HERES A DISCUSSION ON HOSTING LB2 OVER INTERNET VIA HARDWARE ROUTERS (WIRED AND WIRELESS SOLUTIONS)
"Wired & Wireless Router LB2 Hosting & Client Success.... At Last"
Hosting LB2 on internet via routers

AND...
HERES A DISCUSSION ON VOICE COMMS OVER TS2 with LB2 "In Game Voice Comms for LB2 mutiplayer"

AND HERE IS A FORUM DISCUSSION OVER GAMEPLAY FEATURES:
"Features Of LB2 That You May Have Known About"

Now, back to the discussion on graphics tweaking once you have LB2 running...



REFRESH-Rate and FRAMERATE:

The refresh rate is the number of times per second that the RAMDAC is able to send a signal to the monitor and the monitor is able to repaint the screen.

The frame rate of a program refers to how many times per second the graphics engine can calculate a new image and put it into the video memory.

The refresh rate is how often the contents of video memory are sent to the monitor. Frame rate is much more a function of the type of software being used and how well it works with the acceleration capabilities of the video card. It has nothing at all to do with the monitor.

The refresh rate is important because it directly impacts the viewability of the screen image. Refresh rates that are too low cause annoying flicker that can be distracting to the viewer and can cause fatigue and eye strain.

My SONY flat panel refreshes at 60hz. In fact, its the only rate it allows. I must therefore conclude that LB2 is being forced to be refreshed and vertically synched at the monitor refresh rate of 60hz, and not the rate that WinXP default of 75hz.

Can anyone confirm this statement with some authority? I will also look for a refresh (not frame rate) counter. Anyone have a good one to point me to?

Below is an example of a nVidia 6800 tweak tool that allows for both refresh and OverClocking:
http://3dgpu.com/archives/2004/08/09/geforce-6800-tweak-guide/

Below is how on an ATI vcard that we can control the resolution and refresh rate, apart from the WinXP default value of 75 hz (or earlier Win to 60hz).



TWEAKs for Refresh and OC - handle with care
ATI Tool - refresh and overclocking tweak utility

nVidia refresh and oc tweak method

Only what your monitor can handle will actually be attainable. CRTs and LCDs differ by design and hence their refresh rate settings behave differently.

CRTs and LCDs:

The main issue with changing the screen resolution on a CRT monitor is that it affects the refresh rate. The refresh rate refers to the number of times that the screen redraws the image every second. Since there is always movement on your screen, the image needs to be redrawn quite often for it to appear that it is in motion.

Typically, the optimal refresh rate for a CRT monitor is 75Hz, meaning that the image is redrawn 75 times every second. The highest you’ll need is 85Hz, and some people can tell the difference between a 75Hz and 85Hz refresh rate. Anything higher than 85Hz generally won’t be noticeable and can also be dangerous to your monitor, as some people have the tendency to push their monitors to refresh rates beyond what they were intended to use. Anything lower than 75Hz and you may notice a flicker of the image as it refreshes.

Too low of a refresh rate is a common occurrence and is often a major case of tired eyes and office fatigue. “Power users” will tell you they will often sit down at other people’s workstations and notice right away that the refresh rate was too low for comfort.

When dealing with LCDs, refresh rate is not much of a concern since they use a different technology to draw the image. Refresh rates as low as 40Hz or 60Hz are perfectly acceptable with LCD monitors.

What is important is the concept of response time – the time in milliseconds it takes for the screen to update the pixel colors. This is a big deal because a slower response time will give the illusion of “ghosting” – the effect of pixels not updating with new information fast enough, so that a trail is left behind a moving object. This usually happens in high action movies or games and is one of the main reasons why LCDs are often not recommended for gamers. This is changing however, as displays with 20ms – which are just fine for gaming - are becoming more prevalent.

Apart from the technical differences between how LCD and CRTs deal with refresh to handle persistance and flicker; the point related to LB2 multiplayer is that when using the REFRESH SYNC method, we must be aware of our refresh rates amoungst players in the same online session. My LCD has two refresh rates: 60 or 70 hz, thats it. My buddy has a monitor that goes from 45 - 125 hz, he normally is set for 85hz. To reduce the amount of lag and jitter while playing online together, we pick one of our common refresh rates (usually the higher one) and we get the best results.

WRAPPERS
Wrappers are programs which convert the calls of one graphics API into another. This means you can run LB2 a Glide video game without having a glide graphics card (e.g. 3dfx Voodoo5), but using a Direct3D or OpenGL card (e.g. nVidia GeForce or ATI Radeon) instead. (You still need hardware 3D acceleration of some sort if you want playable speeds!)

Are there any drawbacks to using Wrappers?
You are effectively adding another layer of emulation. There can be problems, such as graphics glitches and increased sound stuttering. In particular, you are likely to always lose some visual effects (usually fog, and more subtle things like certain kinds of dynamic lighting or transparency, for example). None of the wrappers are perfect, but in many games they are close, and more than adequate. With LB2 we see that with the known issues like dancing clouds or lines in the 2D cockpit.

Zeckensack\'s Glide Wrapper (To run LB2 in Glide mode) - 1280res limit, has refresh rate control)

dgVoodoo Glide Wrapper - (can go greater than 1280 res and has refresh vert sync control)

Heres what I did (with help from this community) that made the dgVD Wrapper work at 1600res:

- d/l the latest dgVoodoo package
- Unzipped its contents into the LB2 folder
- Set the dgVoodooSetup to be like Shadow's:

- Switched LB2Cfg.exe to 3DFX
- Ran the game, with AA and AF turned on also

========== portion of readme_eng.txt======
V. Installation
---------------

If you don't want to use this wrapper, or/and you just would like to try
it with a certain game/app, then you can copy the needed files into the
directory of that game/app!
=============================

AA/AF/BF/TBM: AntiAliasing & Ansitrophic Filtering & Bilinear Filtering & Trilinear Bitmaps

AA has to do with reducing the jaggies we see on the edges of graphics. Its a technique of blurring pixels. AF has to do with the quality of the patterns we see, so that we dont get interference patterns that close lines might produce.

Bilinear filtering or interpolation is used in computer graphics to reduce "blockiness". In LB2 this would be what smoothes out the 3D world ground tiles to look more blended together.

Tri-linear filtering is combination of bi-linear filtering and mip-mapping which enhances even more the quality of texture mapped polygons. For each polygon that is rendered, the two "MIP maps" that most closely match the polygon size will be used to compute pixel colors that are the most realistic. This technique is superior to both bi-linear and mip-mapping (This reduces rendering artifacts such as "sparkling" and "moiré" patterns as well as blockiness.)

Who can use these advanced 3D techniques? This is a very vcard hardware and driver dependant equation. The nVidia cards appear to be better with AA and AF than the ATI when running LB2 due to the 3dfx and glide bias leans to nVidia's hardware more. Mileage will vary so its hard to pin this down. The common symptoms are: AA causing black 2D cockpit in the Kiowa. Bilinear Filtering causing the HUD symbology to dissapear.

Below is a snap provided by SHADOW using dgVoodoo v1.50b running at 1280x1024@32, 16xSAA and 16xAF


LAG and SYNC in LB2 Multiplayer
Multiplayer "lag" (a/c to a/c positional data jitter or micro-warping) has many sources: inet, latency-ping, packet loss, isp, mtu, game-application, OS, refresh, etc...

The ones that we have in view are related to the game dependance on CPU speed.

To deal with these, there are two basic remedial approaches. Both of these methods work to allow multiplayer to work with minimal lag, and to bring the game's world speed closer to what it was intended. Refresh sync is easier to set up, but is only a course sync. CPU sync is harder to get dialed in, but is a fine tune sync method.
If you care about close up flying or sharing cockpits with minimal lag, the CPU sync method is the more stable of the two methods. For all other general flying and combat, the refresh method is fine and easist for most folk to set up, especially when more than 2 players are flying together online.

1. CPU SYNC
Synch different game speeds down to a common speed that is closer to the CPU clock rate that the game was designed for (200Mhz-750mhz)via CPU slow down utilities. This method controls synching by CPU clock rate tweaking.

2. REFRESH SYNC
Synch the game by video card vertical synch rate control. By limiting the graphics card to only refresh at 60 hz, it makes the game frame rate tied to an external and common control index. This method controls synching by video card refresh rate.

My testing shows that the refresh method is a good course sync method that works for most CPU speeds with no fiddling with CPU speed matching.

The refresh method has a symptom of when getting formation close to AI or another player, once a second you will see a small jitter and when very close the other a/c will dissapear. I believe this had to do with the blank portion of the refresh cycle. When sharing the same a/c as Pilot/CPG, you see a definite micro-pause/warp every second for a short duration.

The CPU method is the fine sync method that can fine tune the systems so that warp and jitter is minimal to even unnoticible. This method is the most precise and does not suffer from the winking out of the other player or AI when very close up. The negative is that it requires experimentation to get two or more systems in lock sync from a CPU speed perspective. For example, two 2.4GHZ systems slowed to 35% of normal, are almost perfectly in lock sync with very little jitter even when sharing the same a/c. I recommend turning off the refresh rate tied to monitor option in the wrappers when using this CPU sync method, rather use a slow down proggy like TURBO.

When the processor is HyperThreaded, the control is less effective due to the nature of what HT was meant to do. HT can be disabled via the BIOS.


UPDATE: 8-25-2007

Using the DGVOODOO glide wrapper along with its monitor refresh feature, no CPU throttling
is needed on WinXPsp2 and Vista32. This wrapper will synch the game world speed to the
monitor refresh rate which is now CPU independant. Ive also found that if online players
also set their monitors/flatpanels refresh to the same frequency (60/70/85 etc) that this
minimizes the: jitter, close up dissapearing, and CPG to Pilot update jitter that happens
when connected together online. The other factors of course are connectivity quality
and whats configured and running concurrently on the PC itself.

As a final note, with systems with 2 or more GB of real memory (RAM) the tricks to fake out
Windows via the MS compatibility tool kit using the memory lie feature are no longer needed.
Im running LB2 on both laptops and desktops with 2Gigs plus run LB2 without any tricks, just
the wrapper and for Vista, setting the desktop icon to WinXP compatibility mode.

-----------------------

Retro-Rotor simming has a rampup learning curve to address the many requirements to make an older game work on newer technology. Hopefully this answers more questions than it creates.

Why? Don't you get artifacts with smoke when you run it through D3D?
How are the clouds with that setting?

Switching to D3D will surely ignore any input from a glide wrapper, such as DGVOODOO, and run purely through D3D. It does when I have just tried it. You need to have the LB2.cfg set to 3DFX for it to pick anything from Dgvoodoo surely.....

Typo? D3D versus 3DFX

Typo alrighty, edited to state 3DFX.

Good catch!

Over time I noticed I would get a "this application is experiencing problems bla-bla-bla" with the settings in the picture above. Usually it would happen every 5th or so mission when loading the debrief-screen or on a very rare occasion in-game at random times.
When I disabled "Force Trilieaner Mipmapp" and "Autogenerate mipmaps" everything is peachy.
I've flown around 15 missions with these latest changes and never experienced any errors.
Maybe something to add to your faq, AV8R?
Do you want me to make a new screenshot with the settings or overwrite the current picture?

edit: Here's my current settings:

Sure Shadow, youre doing fine work.

Is that why we my buddy and I locked up after a debrief during an online campaign?

As you can see, I upgraded from 1.31 to 1.40 but I also ran the same settings I used in 1.31 in 1.40 too with the same results.
Usually when the game crashed mid-game wrapper.dle or flight.tre were the files responsible. When the game crashed when loading the debrief-screen it could be any file that caused it but usually it was wrapper.dle.

Hello AV8R,

A little bit OT, but hope you can give soma advise: I tried to do some graphic tweaks Longbow 2. I dunno if and what did I mess up in Windows Media Player 9 (with glidewrapper?), but since then trying to play any mpg, avi, or whatever video, looks like blue color is completely missing from the picture, but only in Media Player, so the LCD is fine.

Tried to reinstall Media Player, couldn't. ("Installation could not be finished, run installer again")

Any hint?

THX: Razor18

Razor

I have not seen that kind of thing.

Did you put the dgVoodoo wrapper in just the game folder, or did you put it under Windows?

Do you run RESTORE points, and can run the restore back to a time before you added the wrappers?

FYI, if you d/l the latest version of Windows Media Player for WinXP, I believe you are also required to install the .NET software. This may or may not be related to the request to reinstall.

Can a mod sticky this topic?
We referr to this topic all the time

I have no problem with getting stuck.

Can we get the Admin to turn this into a sticky thread?

Hi all. Decided yesterday to see if could get some of my old favorites to work, and thanks to some help I found in this forum I was able to do so.

LB2 is working and it's great to be flying this old classic once again.


The black cockpit mentioned above for the Kiowa, I'm getting it in the Apache. Turning FSAA off cures it. I'm using zeck's wrapper with a 9700 Pro, Cat 5.9 and XP Pro. Any suggestions for using FSAA without the black 'pit?


While I was at it I decided to see how F-15 runs these days. No problem so far!

Hate to burst your bubble, but both sims start crashing after few missions. In XP Longbow 2 worked fine for 3-4 mission, then after quitting the mission it always crashed.

F-15 crashes early in the campaigns. It's a XP bug. There are no good ways of getting around that. Some people modify the missions themselves, but I didn't want to get on that road.

Thanks, I see how you got your handle. You may be right, but I'm not giving up so easily.

Anyone have any tips for my black cockpit issue?

i had an issue because i did not have both the global and the glide windows set for "32bit".
the global window defaulted at 16 bit and caused apache cockpit problems. good luck and regards

Good input Inspector

I wonder if thats whats wrong with the WinME install that Im helping someone with.

No offense, but some extensive troubleshooting may solve that issue.
My last LB2-marathon lasted 7 hours (around 10-12 missions) and did'nt crash once.
All I'm saying is that LB2 is stable enough for me, which is more than I can say for newer games like LOMAC (Yes, I know that was a bad example hehe that unstable PITA).

@DBond:
I recommend you try DGVoodoo 1.40+
Everyone, it seems this is a new re-release. I'm going to see if it has fixed the jumping shadows when I get back home tomorrow (going to a IBM server-update-course/party with free drinks now).
DGvoodoo site is located here .

Thanks, I'll try the DGV wrapper and see how it goes. If I configure that wrapper, will it override the other wrapper I've set up, or will the other need to be reinstalled?

Don't want to jinx myself, but I flew 7 straight campaign missions last night with no trouble.

Thanks very much! It works with the dgVoodoo wrapper. Ahh, much better with FSAA

LB2 Windows Retro Simming Process Overview.

After installing LB2 and its patches, the process to get it running on modern systems boils down to:
1. 366mb memory limiting per OS type and technique
2. Compatibility mode per OS and technique
3. Glide wrapper per Zacks or dgVoodoo
4. Control game world speed per refresh rate or cpu speed techniques
5. Tweak CA.ini file to include HEAP parameter (allow Kiowa to work) and D3D.cfg file for other video card related parameters (video memory)

For more installation details for steps 1 and 2, go to the +G site:
http://www.speichts.com/games/lb2/

CA.ini tweak is not necesarely mandatory. Same with LB2.exe win98-compat mode.

All I had to do was disable my page-file and copy dgvoodoo to the LB2-dir remember.

Im sure mileage varies from sys to sys.
No one method will work for all.

For example, without the HEAP=0 parameter, I could not fly the Kiowa without getting a black 2D cpit or the training missions for it.

Another, disabling page file did nothing for me.

Hopefully, we have capture what will work for most folks.

how do we get a thread like this to become a Sticky?

sticky's are made by the forum moderator, for this one it is SimHQ Staff --- try sending the request to the link at the top of the main lb2 forum page.

regards

Great forum thread everyone. I too will be trying Dgvoodoo 1.40+ toight to try and get better graphics.

Awesome thread, Made my LB2 install look perfectly now, using the dgvoodoo 1.40 plus.
Tried the D3D method, the Z's glide wrapper, but by far the nicest that worked graphically for me was the DGVoodoo 1.40 plus method. Thanls Shadow and AV8R.

since this thread has come back up recently - i have re-read it and noticed a few posted problems about game crashes and could not locate file error messages. it occurred to me that i have not seen a caveat posted which has seemed to be important with lb2 over the years - specifically, the need to defrag your hard drive(s) routinely (the install instructions stress the need to defrag before installation). i defrag monthly and it seems to be valuable.

just another little nugget along the road to add to the rebirth of lb2 popularity....

regards

I would say that the defrag myth was shattered if you use NTFS on XP.

The underlying game code doesn't make system calls to the degree that Win95 did, the HAL on XP keeps the game from touching the hardware basically.

NTFS and XP will complete obfuscate the underlying file system to the game, it doesn't know if it's really a HD, CDROM or flash card or RAM drive.

Fragmented files aren't that big of an issue on NTFS IMO. Yes the drive/OS will take a tad longer to provide the data on a fragmented system, but with the extra CPU power of today's machines, that data gets passed up very fast to the game. It's always good to defrag, but I doubt it'll cause any game crashes with LB2, IF you use XP and IF you use NTFS.

being a win98 user still, i bow to your expertise sir. didnt know about winxp's need not to defrag - but the more info the better i am sure...

regards

Now when I was a DOS, Win9x, ME user I defragged religiously. It certainly helped alot on FAT and FAT32 file systems.

Defragging before installing will help to ensure your game's software is in one contiguous set of data blocks on the HDD.

Even on modern systems, large and CPU and FPS demanding sims like Falcon4, LockOn, MSFS9 and others do benefit from less disk thrashing.

For sims like LB2 where most of it can be resident within our 512 and 1 Gig RAM, its not so much an issue. However, note the difference between LB2 maps installed on the HDD versus on the CDROM, what a big differnce in access time there is there.

I noticed a huge speed increase just by having both disks, turned into Iso's and loaded using dameware tools mounted as cd1 and cd2. Its very very fast compared to accessing the cdroms.

A HD will beat a CDROM anyday! Mounting the ISO's is a great way to go with LB2. Besides, you can keep the precious originals stored in a safe place.

`DGVoodoo question:
On my widescreen laptop it natively uses 1680x1050 resolution. When I initially used the laptops original drivers, DGVoodoo showed me a selectable 1680x1050 resolution and the game was widescreen. I then updated my laptops ATI 9700 pro drivers to ATI's Cat 5_12 drivers. Now, even though my laptops "desktop" resolution is set to 1680x1050, when I open DGvoodoo's interface, it shows that my laptop is set to 1680x1050, but of the resolutions I can select in the drop-down box, the maximum is 1400x1050.
Question: is there a file I can edit for DGVoodoo that will allow me to play the game widescreen at 1680x1050 versus playing it with the current resolution where I have black bars on both sides?

I think dgvoodoo fetches video-resolutions from DirectX. Can you add 1680x1050 in your video-drivers as a custom resolution?

I remember a while back that I was unable to select 1280x960 in Hidden & Dangerous 2, but in Windows I had that resolution. So I added 1280x960 to the Forceware-drivers as a custom-res, then I was able to select that res in-game.
I don't know the capabilities of ATI's drivers though.

Thanks Shadow, I will look around the ATI panels to see if I can add it somewhere.
Makes sense.

Is anyone using dgVoodoo 1.40 with ATI's newest driver release (5.13)? I'm following the instructions from the speichts.com site and I've gotten the game to run with software rendering. Everytime I try to get the dgVoodoo setup program to run, I just get an error message from windows and it shuts down dgVoodoo before it can even load up. I've yet to see the set up window that's shown in this thread.

EDIT - I'm running an ATI X800XL with an A64 3500+ and 2gigs of ram. LB2 was installed to the default location (C:/Janes/Longbow2/)

Hmm, something wrong with dgVoodoo then if you can't run setup, have you tried the other wrapper instead?

ID42... try an earlier version of dgVoodoo, think it was version 1.31 or something? A friend had the same problems as you with 1.40+ and an ATI card but the earlier version worked better.

Hope it works!

/KC

I finally got dgV to run after I reinstalled a clean XP install imaged file. The problem was caused by some crappy HP software or driver coding. As soon as I installed the drivers and related software for an HP printer-scanner device, it killed dgV.

Now I need to find a better scanner-printer without lousy drivers or programs bundled with it. I don't want to hijack this thread so if anyone is running dgV and a printer-scanner setup without any problems, I wouldn't mind the model of the device. Now to install LB2 again and see if I can get it running with dgV.

Anyone want an HP PSC1315 cheap? :p

Heya
Installed LB2 again on my new rig, installed dgV1.40+ ( settings) in the lb2 directory, set monitor refresh rate to 60hz and vertical sync on in nhancer and run lb2 with win98 compat-mode. Runs fine but way too fast. Did I miss something out? thx

Your settings are the same as mine. Did you use the Windows Application Compatibility Toolkit method during your install? That's what I used. You'll have to wait until one of the others see your post and provide you with more help.

The laptop Im typing on has a 1440x900 resolution 17 inch LCD. It has a P4 3.0Ghz hyperthreaded Intel CPU with 1.25Gig RAM.

LB2 via MS Compat TK and the dgVoodoo 1.40+ runs and looks fine - no black bars.
This is with AA and AF on a built in x300 ATI mobile video card. Older driver 6.14.10.6476

Being that the refresh rate of the game is
controlled by the glide wrapper, and in synch with the LCD's refresh rate of 60 hz; LB2s game speed is "normal" and runs fine in multiplayer with other systems similiarily configured.

If Thrawn's dgVoodoo is setup properly for GLIDE and with Shadow's suggested settings that set the application (LB2 world) refresh rate to the monitor's vertical synch rate; then the game shouldnt run too fast - unless the monitor refresh rate is much greater than 60-70 hz. Some CRT monitors can run as high as 120 hz. This may be a problem, especially when playing online with others.

Hi all. I just came to Longbow2 and I have to say that thanks to this Forum and some other web resources I've been able to troubleshoot all my problems to get it going and accelerate it in 3D.

I managed to play successfully the first cooperative flight (pilot+copilot) this evening.


Have to say I'm really impressed how a 9 years old game still has a comunity that sticks to it.


Well, once again thanx!!

Hi , I had the longbow2 CDs for quite a while and too would like to get startet , but unfortunately the links to the required patches (the ones at the EA ftp!!!) link to patches which triger my antivirus software, can anybody verify this ?!?

I allready emailed him about it and so far found only the virus free 2.09 english version (unfortunately I have the german language version , no luck finding the patch, I will keep on searching)


update: looked like a false alarm....
hope Im in the air soon

You're right. My Eizo Widescreen panel also only supports 60 Hz. There are some HD ready TFT's that support both 60 and 75 Hz (for perfect synch to both 30fps and 25fps) but most of them support only one frequency. A TFT can't change frequency as CRT monitors can do.

I dont see where you are trying to get with the 25 and 30 fps and 60 and 75Hz. 25fps is the norm on tv broadcasting, 30fps is not a standard for anything. 60 and 75Hz have become todays standard refresh rate for LCD, though one can argue whether the 75Hz is needed.

Human eye integration factors aside, which has to do with "flicker" and the minimal refresh rate that a person can detect...

FPS (First Person Shooter) gamers reach for the highest refresh rates possible, while flight simmers shoot for the best frame rates possible. Reason being: Aircraft require fast frame rates and shooters require fast refresh rates due to different "success" criteria.

In shooters the goal is to pull the trigger and
frag the other guy ASAP, so they want faster and
faster refresh rate which increases the "world" speed and hence who gets shot first. Hence refresh rate is key to shooter's survival. These guys want over 150 Hz monitors and vcards.

In flight sims, milisecond timing of shots isnt the issue. Rather in flight sims the main issue
is avoiding shimmer and jitter due to the image
not being able to be drawn faster. Simmers want a fluid picture and hence frame rate is key. Frame rates at least 30 fps and reaching for 60+ at the desired resolution is considered great irregardless of the refresh rate.

Optimally you want both, fast framerate and fast
refresh rate. With the exception of LB2 and other retro sims where slowing down the systems is the goal. So LB2 we want a controlled refresh rate of 60hz to be compatible with other online players, and a fast (>30fps) frame rate at our desired resolution.

Does this help?

[/QB][/QUOTE]I dont see where you are trying to get with the 25 and 30 fps and 60 and 75Hz. [/QB][/QUOTE]

he's probably talking about using v sync, where framerate is limited to a divisor of refresh rate.

30 Hz is standard for several HDTV formats eg. in Europe, because 25fps is seen as too few fps for smooth playback (I also added the 60 Hz formats):

• 1080p60
• 1080p30
• 1080i60 (psf)
• 720p60
• 720p30
• 720i60 (psf)

psf means Progressive Scan with Segmented Frames (aka half-frames or interlaced), so 60 Hz interlaced are effectively 30 Hz full frame.

The NTSC color format, eg. used in the US runs at 30/1,001 = ca. 29,97003 Hz ~ 30Hz
NTSC b/w runs at exactly 30 Hz.

Sorry, I forgot about the NTSC system.
btw regular NTSC requires a little more bandwidth than 29.9KHz actually. Closer to 31.something KHz (my old CRT projector support up to 30.5KHz and it isnt enough). Some bandwidth is also used for refreshing horizontal too. But close enough.
Anyway, the LCD monitors can change refreshrates, they just cant change resolution.
So by having a 75Hz LCD monitor you can just as well use 60Hz on it.
So by tying this into the wrapper-side of things, all LCDs can use 60Hz with vsync on in the wrapper.

Shadow said:
"So by tying this into the wrapper-side of things, all LCDs can use 60Hz with vsync on in the wrapper."

The dgVoodoo wrapper effectively allowed us to
synch the game world speed across all kinds of
computer speeds and configurations via the refresh rate synching option.

The manual "throttling" CPU methods are no longer
needed as the only means to control refresh rates of all players is the same world or in solo play.

When all players are in a consistant world speed and a/c behavior environment;
then we have what we see today in our ability to
have very good multiplayer and even shared
cockpits in LB2.

All players having about the same refresh rate
is the key to the puzzle.
Some being higher or lower than others, Ive seen
results in momentary blanking (winking out)
of the other playrs the closer you get to them.

You're talking about horizontal refresh rate (usually in kHz), we were talking about vertical refresh rate (usually in Hz).

The NTSC frame rate is 29.97 interlaced frames per second! This yields an effective framereate of 59.94 Hz (meaning 59.94 full frames per second)

This is the so-called vertical refresh rate and tells how often the cathode ray is moved from the top to the bottom of the screen, thus telling how many pictures per second are generated.
The vertical refresh rate tells how often the cathode ray moves across the screen from left to right.

If you know the horizontal refresh rate you can calculate the vertical refresh rate easily.

Your example:

30.5 KHz horizontal refresh rate.
If your projector could display 1024x768 pixels, then the maximum framerate possible would be:

Horiz. rate/horiz. lines x 0.95 (because the ray needs about 5% of the time to travel back to the opposite side of the screen in the next line to display.

30500/768x0.95= 37.728 Hz

But your projector is a "near" NTSC projector, I think
Take the 480 lines of an NTSC frame:
30500/480x.95= 60.365 Hz Voilá!
A complete NTSC frame has 525 lines, the difference is used for synch, captioning etc. So your projector can't obviously show NTSC frames but maybe computer frames (640x480) at 60 Hz

Now you know why good CRT monitors have a horizontal refresh rate of more than 100 kHz.
You need this especially for higher resolutions.

Speaking of TFT's changing the refresh rate:

My TFT supports 59-61 Hz only.

TFT's that can show both refresh rates usually can't display refresh rates other than 60 Hz and 75 Hz, with a small margin of course.

Apart from that TFT's neither change the refresh rate nor the physical! resolution. CRT'S can change both, refresh rate and resolution (actually the aperture mask is not changeable too).

You were talking about bandwidth (meaning horizontal refresh rate actually), that's something different from both vertical and horizontal refresh rate.
The NTSC tv channel bandwidth lies at 6 MHz. More information about tv signal bandwidth, sidebands etc. is available at wikipedia.

Hi Fellow Pilots,

I want to Express my thankfulness for giving us again this great title Longbow 2,

I've installed it as it appears in the speichts guide and it came to life, but a problem has developed with it,

My hardware is not a gaming rig but it can handle Longbow 2 easily, my video board is A nVidia FX 5700LE (latest drivers installed) and the problem I have is that when you switch to an external view, The "transparency" of the crew's glass windshield panels has gone out, instead It looks like a mirror, "reflecting" everything outside the helicopter, but the most annoying is that both, the main Rotor and the tail rotor appear like opaque black disks, the fuzzy rotational illusion is not Shown anymore.

I've set all the features of the video card almost to the ground (no anti aliasing, no mipmapping, No everything, nothing at all) and the problem persists.

I've downloaded and executed the useful Glide Wrapper, but making every sort of changes Did not resolved anything.

Please, let me know if you have a solution for this near apparently unresolvable error.

SAGU,

Make sure youre running 3DFX and not D3D mode
if you have installed the D3D update patch.

This may be the cause of your mirrored windows on the cockpit.

First, got LB2 working fine, all I had to do was patch it, install the XP Compatibility Kit, and set up the Glide wrapper. It has not crashed yet, all the choppers work.

But two things...
(1) The different parts of the cockpit are not connected, there are little lines spaceing them apart, its not a big problem is there anything I can do to fix it?

(2) Is there any thing in the ca.ini I can modify to make the visuals better...
[GRAPHICS]
XResVideoMode=640
YResVideoMode=480
GammaCorrection=6
FarClip=7890
MeshDetail=2
TerrainLighting=1
Shadows=1
ObjectDetail=2
DetailedHelicopters=1
ObjectLighting=1
CockpitRotorFx=1
LensFlareFx=1
TextureMap=1
Perspective=1
DrawSky=1
Dither=1
SmokeDensity=2
SmokeEffectFx=2
MaxBitmaps=100
Trees=0
TreeDetail=0
TreeSamples=0

Thank you.

Hello Ryan, try turning antialiasing off. That should get rid of the gaps in the cockpit. However, you will see the "jaggies" in your graphics. I've decided live with the gaps to have better 3d world. I;m running with the dgVoodoo wrapper in 3dfx(glide) mode. My CA.ini settings are as follows and things look great:

[GRAPHICS]
XResVideoMode=640
YResVideoMode=480
GammaCorrection=6
FarClip=15780
MeshDetail=16
TerrainLighting=1
Shadows=1
ObjectDetail=15
DetailedHelicopters=1
ObjectLighting=1
CockpitRotorFx=1
LensFlareFx=1
TextureMap=8
Perspective=1
DrawSky=1
Dither=1
SmokeDensity=2
SmokeEffectFx=2
MaxBitmaps=5000
Trees=1
TreeDetail=9
TreeSamples=80000

Gosh, i gave up on this sim and tossed the CD long ago, now wish I didn't,, Its great that is getting renewed attention. or is is sad that companies arent putting out updated versions of these great flight sims.. that we have to shake the bones of these old ones to keep them alive

Just wanted to tell how I got LB2 running on my latest computer with DGvoodoo 1.50b

Installed and patched with 2209e.
Removed page-file (got 2 GB RAM here too).
Used all the same settings as in DGvoodoo 1.4 (except a few of those are missing in 1.5).
Set DGvoodoo to DX7-mode (in DX9 LB2.exe crash on exit).
No need for compatibility-mode or HEAP_PERCENT=0.

Now running LB2 at 1280x1024@32, 16xSAA and 16xAF.

Screenshot (470KB)

Specs are:
C2D E6700
2GB DDR2-667MHz
3x250GB and Adaptec 2420SA (RAID5)
Asus P5B w/onboard AC97 audio (terrible soundcard btw)
XFX GF7950 GX2 (91.47 WHQL)
WinXP Pro SP2

Hi Shadow,

speaking on shadows...

notice that your KIOWA's shadow is the Apache's?
look where the tail planes and pods are.

No, the Kiowa's shadow is outside the picture.

No more jumpy clouds with DGvoodoo 1.50b

Here are my settings. Can you put this into the first post, AV8R?

Guys, not sure if this has been mentioned before but I believe I found a few more back door items.

[Backdoors]
FullOnFlightModel=1
IN_DEBUGGER=1
NoTerrainCache=1
env=c

Full flight model seems to allow for a better flight model. Debugger puts you in debug mode and runs the game from a window. No terrainCache right now crashes the system but my guess is that it loads the terrain discretely without a buffer. Probably would have to tweak a few more items to get it to work. The env=c automatically brings you back to the debriefing area of the last mission you flew before exiting the game. It brings you there right after you double click the lb2 icon. I guess this would come in handy if you were continuing a campaign.

To turn off the ones you dont want put a ";" in front or set them equal to zero.

[Backdoors]
;FullOnFlightModel=1
;IN_DEBUGGER=1
;NoTerrainCache=1
;env=c
HEAP_PERCENT=0

Nice catch Shadow and thanks for sharing! It was a minor glitch but quite annoying

And of course kudos to DEGE (creator of dgVoodoo) for all his work with the wrapper. Now if we just could crack that long lasting FFAR issue...

/KC

Wow...nice not to have jittering clouds anymore. Kudos to DEGE indeed and thanks to Shadow=ASP= for mentioning it.

"Here are my settings. Can you put this into the first post, AV8R?"

- done.


Why dont you post your no-swap-no-MSCompatToolKit-with-2GigRAM-setup instructions here Shadow?

Guys,

Very new to the board and I hope to be able to play my beloved Longbow Gold once again. I'm having trouble running the prog under Winxp pro. I have an nvida 9600, amd 3.0 gig athlon, 1 gig of ram. I downloaded the beta dg voodoo pro and moved the required fils to the LongBow folder. I still get the LBwin.exe and needs to close error. I also have a dual monitor setup as well. What am I doing wrong?

My bad I have an geforce fx 5500 graphics card.

That is Longbow 1 or Longbow 1 Gold. I have'nt heard of any success with LB1 and Win2000/XP.
This thread is for Longbow 2.
Thats easy
*Install the game.
*Set EXE-compatibility to win98/95.
*Copy DegeVoodoo's files into the LB2 install-dir.
*Disable Pagefile.
*Reboot and run the game.

If game crash/freeze on mission debrief:
Add this to CA.ini
[Backdoors]
HEAP_PERCENT=0

Might aswell add that CA-tweak from the beginning. There is no harm in using it even if you dont need it.

Thanks for your reply.

I did the setup as your post suggested and I still get the error box. Oh well...

Update:

I got the game running!

The only thing is that the game pixelates real badly at start and when I press the escape key to get it to go to the menu it clears up.

The second major glitch is that the game crashes about a minute or 2 when I'm about the start a mission. Any solutions?

Thanks for the help guys.

Can you tell us what kind of crash you experience and exactly when it happens?
Your computer specs and the method you used to get LB2 running would be nice too.

Since this is a LongBow 2 thread I deleted the game and am installing version 2. I'll post how it goes. Thanks for the help gentleman.

I'm playing the game!

I have a couple questions though:

I don't seem to be playing the game at high resolutions. It looks like I'm playing in 16 bit more. What can I do to correct or verify this?

Also, I have a wingman extreme 3d joystick whose hat does not toggle displays. Any ideas why?

Thanks! Guys. I'm having a blast with the game.

Are you using the dgVoodoo wrapper explained in the first post in this thread?

Tnanks Shadow, I got it resolved. The graphics look great.

The other more pressing problem I'm having is that I cannot play any other missions other than the default NTC Ford Ord mission, The others crash the program all the time. What gives?

Tried setting LB2.exe to Win98 compatibility mode?
Scratchy discs?

I have newly installed using the instructions at Speichts along with the dgVoodoo 1.50 wrapper and found some great success. However, while in combat missions, not training flights, whenever I open the options menu with Alt-O, call the Mission Planner screen with Alt-N, or use the lookdown screen, the screen breaks up into four "blocks" or quadrants. The text or display is sized as normal, but the blocks overlap one another so they are quite useless. Again, this does not occur in training flights and the other screens (base, mission planning, etc) are unaffected.

I seem to recall, in my attempts to get the program to work under WinXP Pro, having adjusted the resolution in my CA.ini file from 640x480 to 1280 x 1024 and I don't know if I ever went back once I got it working using the 366MB RAM cap and dgVoodoo wrapper.

Does this error sound familiar and does my having altered CA.ini sound like the likely culprit? Sadly, I am at work and unable to apply the fix just yet and it only just occured to me that I may not have restored my CA.ini file!

Thanks in advance all,

SGT Impaler

I'll try those suggestions, guys, I really appreciate your help overall. I get to play my fav helo sim! Hooah!

Impaler - Yes, your "split" map is due to the CA.ini resolution change you made. I made the same mistake a few months ago, and resetting it back to the original values fixed the issue.

Rene - Your hat switch is likely set up as POV. As such, it will control your head movements in virtual cockpit and TADS/radar azimuth in the static cockpit.

Your problem with only being able to load an NTC mission is likely due to your discs. You can either mount the discs as virtual drives or make copies of the discs (which corrected the issue for me).

Franze,

I downloaded the wingman extreme file from Logitech's site and moved it to the Longbow main file and the hat views work fine. I will probably create virtual disks as you suggested.

The games does not crash anymore. Sweet! I can fly al the missions now, just re copied the files to new disks and everything is smooth.

I have one more hurdle, the Blackhawk's cannons & guns are not accessible. I can't engage the guns on it, is there a key or known issue?

I believe the key in the manual for toggling pilot and cp/g is Num0

And the numpad period key will cycle between left or right gunner seats.

Franze, you were correct. When I got home last night, I went ahead and returned the values to 640x480 and viola, no more problems (well, unless you count the fact that I keep slamming myself into hills because I fly too fast too low while messing with the keyboard!)

I'll try it again, but the numeric keys wee not working the other time I tried them. I'll give it one more shot.

IIRC they dont work during the tutorial missions but work for everything else.

Guys,

I tried again, even on a campaign, and the numeric keys for the door gun are not working for me. Maybe if I try the key mapping change on the options menu?

Hello All,

I used the guide and have the game seemingly working fine. However, the color seems to be a little off. I think I have a tinge of purple mixed in with my screen. My sky is not as blue as those in the pics in this thread. Can anyone help?

Thanks

Nevermind. I think it was my Gamma correction in my Catalyst Control Center. I set it down to 1.1. 1.0 seemed a little too bright for me, monitor is at 50 in brightness

I've noticed the purplish twinge as well in any lighting condition except high noon. The sky has more of a cyan shade to it than azure blue, but it looks pretty much like the screenshots on the box to me. Isn't it amazing how seemingly minor changes in gama correction value can have such impact on the way the game is displayed?

Does anyone know what the "Tree" values do in the graphics config files? I seem to remember, way back when Longbow 2 was just released, screenshots showing actual trees spread out through the terrain.

So far from what I can tell it only adds more green blotches to the terrain. Would be great if you could find a link to that screen shot. Perhaps the tree 3d models are in there somewhere...

hello,
things seem to be going along swimmingly.
great advice given here, and the usual willingness of the more adept to help those struggling to play again this ancient game.
i salute you.

if i remember correctly - the tree settings were included in the config files but the 3d models did not make it into the game due to current "average computer" capabilities of computers in that era - marketing stuff. the screenshot mentioned may have been a prerelease ad circulated by electron arts. flexman would know. you still around?

anyway, keep up the good work - i have to go scratch this itch to come back in now.

Sticky this, please

I got my new puter running with LB2 on WinXP SP2 Multimedia

It is a dual2core Intel processor with 2Gigs RAM and an ATI x1950pro video card

To run LB2 all I had to do was:
- Install LB2 and patch
- setup for 3dfx with LBCFG.EXE
- the usual LB2 CA.INI file tweaks
- configure the DGVOODOO Glide wrapper
- set virtual swap memory to zero (I have 2Gigs RAM)

Only one thing caught my attention, the BASE SCREENs all said UNAVAILBLE
for LOW/MED/HIGH resolution settings for the graphics in the LB2 GUI.

Anyways, LB2 ran no problems on a 22 inch LCD flat panel at 1680x1050x32

Thats looks very good, and u dont have thoses lines in the cockpit either. Congrats

The lines show up more in day than night, plus in this case Im using x8 FSAA and I
believe that helps to hide it.

Nice indeed

But how's the game speed?

I've been playing it since 2 weeks on a Core2 duo 6300 (+ 8800GTS and DGvoodoo glidewrapper) and but found the game running about 2-3x times too fast. I measured it with the HUD-time to next waypoint: at constant speed 2 mins to nexs waypoint should be exact 2 mins measured, but it was less then a minute at first.
Searched for some program that could lower CPU speed, but did not have any succes untill for no apparrent reason I throttled the Core2duo with Intel Thermal Analysis Tool.

I found out that when I ran my C2d throttled to 25% (+/- 750mhz) 2 mins HUD time is actually 2 mins in realtime!!

The game now runs supersmooth on 1600x1050, 8x FSAA and 16x AF

So: if you want to run LB2 on a core2duo and need to lower the game's speed: use INTEL TAT!

Only problem is that gun and rocket accuracy (guns works good enough on longer ranges - >0.5kms - because of the bulletspread, rockets are virtually unusable)

I am no longer using any CPU speed control utility, and thats for any of my PCs:
AMD-mil64-2.5 Ghz, P4-2.4 Ghz, P4-HT-3.0Ghz, P4-HT-3.4Ghz, D2C-2.18Ghz

We used to use this throttle down method before this Glide wrapper, but it is no longer necessary
unless you run D3D and not Glide 3Dfx graphics and wrapper.

If you use the DGVOODOO wrapper and set it up as we recommend via the REFRESH settings,
the game world rate will be limited to the monitor's refresh rate (60, 65, 70 hz) and
thus you dont need to throttle down your CPU.



Note also, when you play multiplayer and share a common cockpit (pilot/cpg) get both players to
run the same monitor refresh rate (60hz or whatever) to reduce the amount of visable update blinking
and close up formation winking out of the other a/c when very close.

Hi - I'll not create a brand new discussion for this, but instead, place it in here. I would like to thank everyone that's worked so hard on making this game playable again on updated systems. From the install guides to the graphics tweaks, you all are to be commended. Thank you, very much.

Using the tweaks in this thread, I'm amazed that LB2 looks like it does. IMO, it's as good, maybe even better, than when I played it using my Voodoo3. (Could be my imagination.. )

Thanks again everyone for your work and time in showing others how to pump life back into this wonderful game.

KK

*EDIT* I forgot to post my computer specs, just in case they can help someone else. Not the best system in the world, but it does what I want it to.. most of the time..

PIII 750MHz
1GB RAM
GeForce Ti 200 64MB
Sidewinder Precision 2 joystick
On board sound (have an Audigy card that I'm going to install soon)

The appreciation is always nice!

hi

i gave up on LB1 and install LB2 but i can not find LB2Cfg.exe anywere i look on the 2 cd´s and in dir were the game install.
i use the big install.

Thanks

Chaos, I believe you only get that file when the Display DirectDraw Update (DDU) patch is installed. It doesn't hurt anything (iirc, it was for D3D improvement and we normally use the Glide approach) to install it in my experience, and you get the config utility which is easier to use than going into an ini and change the file or whatever it is.

http://www.speichts.com/games/lb2/basic_install.html

Chaos, if you haven't used this site for installation guidance, it's superb (with thanks to +G).

thanks now iam in the game and can see the chopper, now i will test more to see if its stable.

thanks again for u help

New Apps Note;

Now days I have LB2 running on a QuadCore/Vista32 and a Dual2Core/WinXP-SP2.

When I was setting up LB2 on the WinXP rig, for some reason LB2 would
- have UI sounds, but none in the 3D or 2D world/Cockpit
- crash upon exit

What I found out by trial and error, was I had DX9 selected instead of DX7 in DGVooDooSetup.
Apparently for my rig, at least, LB2 likes DX7 better. Yes, I know thats what on the picture
above that I posted, but for some reason I tried DX9 for grins. It seems to matter.

Thats it for now. Keep em flying and hovering

My Longbow2 rig has a Voodoo3 2000 PCI card in it. I can run it fine at the default resolution but, when I try to follow the DGVoodoo 1.50Beta wrapper setup, I lose my cockpit. Anyone know if the wrapper works with an actual voodoo card or should I get another card if I want 1600x1200 res on a 20" monitor?

Thanks!

EDIT:

Also, does this issue...

"If you're using Windows 95/98/ME and your have more than 366MB of RAM installed on your PC, you'll probably need to adjust your maximum Windows memory settings as well."

Include video ram too? I have 192 sys ram, if my vid card has 128 and I bump my sys ram to 256, will that cause problems?

Thanks!

New Longbow2 box specs:

Win 98 SE/DX7
P3 1000 Mhz
192 Meg PC100 SDRAM
GeForce FX5200 128MB AGP
SB Live

So, I am up and running at 1600x1200 with the wrapper. However, I now have corrupt videos and stuttering in game.

Are there any further tweaks to fix these issues?

Thanks!

After all your hardware building, that's not a pleasant outcome! But have you tried dumbing down your graphic card settings in Nvidia's control panel? Try everything as application controlled or off. If the driver is so old it doesn't have all the settings that might help, try Riva Tuner.

I've never seen these issues, so not clear on specific tweaks. But you know there are quite a few options in the wrapper...one is the "closer to real hardware" option. Also lowering the texture memory selection size if you have that maxed might help. And you might experiment with enabling the vertical synch option under Refresh rate.

Good like UTR!

Looks like that was the fix! Thanks man!!!

Hi Guys,

I had it working last fall with my system

Q9450 Quad Core
HD4870
4Gb OZC 1066 Ram

However, first McAfee, deleted lb2.exe as generic virus. Now, I figured out how to restore the file, and turn off McAfee to play the game. However, I've since upgraded my Cat drivers to 9.4. Now the game loads and I can see inside my purple cockpit, but not out the windows.

I think I may delete the wrappers and re-install. If that doesn't work, I will try working backwards on the Cat drivers until I get it working again.

That is one benefit I have of getting laid off.

I will report back with results.

That was fast. I switched to 3dfx mode on the lbcfg. Even with the ati card, it works!!

Now to get rid of the purple cockpit, lol

p.s. Anyone else have the into video look like the old melted films from grade school? lol

Doesnt matter what videocard you're using. If you have the DDU-update installed (not necessary), it must be set to 3dfx for the wrapper to work.
What purple cockpit?
The videos are just regular bink-videos. Never seen any issues with bink-videos ever.