After posting my Logitech MOMO for sale and receiving a pretty quick response once I posted a link to the simRacing forums, I started to think about some of the other things I have that I don't really use or need anymore. I've been gaming on 'modern' PCs since getting an IBM PS/1 for Christmas in 1992. It was the culmination of over 3 long years of begging and pleading with my parents. I had an old Tandy CoCo3 which I had gotten when I was 5. But it obviously couldn't compare or keep up with newer games. So at the age of 13, I stepped into a larger world. I was so dedicated to start gaming on PCs that earlier that year, in the summer, I got a small job doing this and that and when I had gotten around $60 saved up, I promptly went down to the EB in the mall and bought Aces of the Pacific. I still didn't have a computer to run it on, and at the time I didn't know exactly when I would, but being a young WW2 Pacific-theater junkie, I knew I had to have it as soon as I had seen a preview and ad for it in Computer Gaming World a few months before. I read the huge, spiral-bound manual (man, I miss those!) over and over and tried to learn about what the 'technical supplement' meant by configuring memory. I had no experience in that before but I was ready to learn as I went, completely on my own.

After getting my new PS/1, I proceeded to get some more games popular at the time, like Wing Commander, World Circuit, F15 Strike Eagle 3, Task Force 1942. and X-Wing. (Funny thing about X-wing was I never knew about it until the day I bought it at EB. I just happened on it and thought it looked awesome. I wasn't disappointed but it showed how funny fate could be). I would spend hours and days configuring just the right settings in the autoexec,bat and config.sys (kids got it so easy nowadays!) to leave as much memory as possible to be able to see the 'cinematic' intro, have digitized sound and be able to use my mouse. In particular, I remember after I bought F15 Strike Eagle3, I spent from the time I got home from school on Friday afternoon, all day Saturday and all of Sunday until I had to get ready for bed, just trying to get it to squeeze into the whole 4mb of Ram and at least 610k or so of conventional memory. I finally was able to get it right about 10 mins before I had to shut it down to go to bed...well, better late than never, I suppose...

In the early summer of 1993, I read in Computer Gaming World a multi-part article of a game that was going to revolutionize the sim genre. It gave some very tantalizing screenshots which totally blew me away. It was nothing I had seen before, one of the earliest uses of texture mapping in a game. Where as in World Circuit (F1GP for the rest of you) you had to kinda use your own imagination because everything was pretty much flat-shaded polygons, this sim raised the bar higher than I thought possible. The sim I'm talking about is IndyCar Racing. When it was released a little bit later, my poor PS/1 was barely able to even run it, much less at a playable rate. I think my FPS were somewhere around 6 or 7...lol...but nonetheless, I was hooked. Fate intervened once again, as FL's notorious lightning wiped out my long suffering system. Next up was a $4000 monster, an AMD-equivalent 486/66DX2. (I wasn't aware that it was an AMD CPU and not Intel until much later toward the end of it's life, when lightning again claimed another PC's life...yeah, if you live in FL, you quickly grow a healthy, if not terrified, respect for lightning) IndyCar Racing was totally new again for me on this new speed demon and I wondered how I could have possibly lived without it before. Nascar Racing quickly came along followed by IndyCar Racing 2. All played rather well on the 486/66DX2, but only in 'low-res' 320x200. Cranking it up to 'hi-res' 640x480 brought it to it's knees in a heartbeat. The S3 805 video card inside with a whopping 1mb of DRAM just couldn't handle hi-res and ground down to a 1 FPS rate making it utterly unplayable. I actually still have a Nascar Racing demo disc which has Tally on it and you can run a few practice laps. I'm not entirely sure how I got it though. (Speaking of rare demo disks, I also have a 2-disk very early demo of Tie Fighter, which is 'wrapped' in an advertisement of the 'new' Dodge Neon, which gives some stats about the car and some small photos. Or you can just play a seemingly unending mission in Tie Fighter. I don't know if I just never got to the end of the mission or there actually isn't any)...

I continued to grab every Papyrus sim that came out over the years, all the way to the last, Nascar Racing 2003. I was also involved in a few leagues driven in Nascar Racing 3, 4 and 2003, plus I spent more than 80 hours total painting a car for Bluesnews.com, one of my favorite sites. After Papy was laid to rest and NR2003 was pulled from the shelves, I was aware of the huge price increase it brought but I didn't want to part with it since I was still racing online regularly. Fast-forward to now and it's been quite a while since I've actually even ran it on my new systems, even though it is installed. Once the Sierra servers went quiet, I kinda just drifted from it altogether. I now spend most of my racing time in rFactor or one of the TOCA series or SHIFT. I would like to get into iRacing someday soon but economics bars me from trying it right now...

That said, I wonder if I should just sell it? I don't think I could charge anywhere near the $200 they're asking on eBay with a clear conscience. So this is what I'm thinking...and with input from you guys, it may change. I'd be willing to sell it if there is interest. I would also be willing to give a discount to anyone who could buy it within the next two days and pay with PayPal. I really haven't had a lot of time lately and I don't want to have to put it into a normal auction or wait weeks for a buyer. If there isn't a lot of interest, then I'll probably just keep it for the time being.

So, let me know what you guys think and I'll go from there...


=-Rigs-=

I'm probably keeping my copy of NR03 until forever plus infinity. I don't even use it anymore, but that hasn't stopped me from also keeping Need for Speed 2 SE, Wing Commander III, Motor City Online, and even my Atari 2600.

If you aren't the type to hold onto games because of nostalgia (even if you'll never play them again) then sure, go ahead and sell.

I've got my whole set of the NASCAR Racing series and I'll keep them as long as I've got a PC, even if I don't play them anymore. Guess I fall into the nostalgia category that Lugs mentioned.

We'll most likely never see another Nascar PC title again so hang on to those Nascar sims you already have!

Same here. I wouldn't even exchange it for a G27, LOL. But, seriously, keep it if you still want to have some decent offline NASCAR races. NR2003 is the only option available. VHR 2012 is awesome, but you can't seem to race with more than 15 AIs without big pile ups every two laps or so.

This is why we race VHR ONLINE on the SimHQ server! Not often enough, but we do have some great racing when we do.

No kiddin, we are about due. I've been slumming elsewhere to get my door to door action lately.

I bought my copy through e-bay. Wouldn't sell it for twice the price.I love the GTP mod.Its like gold, its only gonna go up in value.

Ok, then let me ask you guys this then...If your copy was somehow damaged, destroyed or lost, how much would you be willing to pay to get another one, realistically speaking?

I have every Nascar Racing title since they started, with the one exception being Nascar Racing 2. Instead I have Nascar Racing 1999. Well, that and I don't have Nascar Legends, but I would consider it debatable whether it's a true Nascar Racing title. I'd imagine those of you here would consider it so, but the rest of the gaming public might not. I think I did have Nascar Racing 2 for a short while, but traded it for 1999, or maybe even sold it and turned around and bought 1999. It's been a while so I'm not sure.

I've been playing VHR 2012 since release and had played it's predecessor as well. I'm in the process of updating my 'Bluesnews.com' skin but I've forgotten how to render it when I'm finished. Below is the one I did a few years ago, while I was in the MNRL NR2003 Busch-series league. I haven't had the time to search out another league so it's single-player only for me at the moment. I pretty much gave up on NR2003 online after Sierra pulled the plug on the servers and the official message board. Then as now, I didn't have much time to seek out a new league...





=-Rigs-=

I'll never sell my copy of NR2003, that go's for GPL too.
Used to race it online lots, mostly Tally as it was the only track my best mate would race but I did venture elsewhere without him occasionally.
Haven't played it in ages even though its installed.

My cars