Joe,

OT: Congrats on your graduation!

On Topic: FYI, I took the plunge and bought an ATI 9700 and am running new 4.6 catalyst drivers. I get the grid lines (and HUD messages) in the water with sparkling water and low level noise ON. With them both OFF I'm ok. I have not tried the FSAA option yet but I will try it and edit this post. My specs in my sig.

FSAA will not get rid of gridlines with cat 4.6 drivers. I tested it yesterday. With 3.6 or 4.1, FSAA will get rid of gridlines.

Joe - Give me your advice on my setup then - for running Jane's FA-18....

I have a Win XP (Home) 1.6ghz, 640 RAM - Ti-4200ASUS 128 RAM video card - I am running DX8.1 and I am using Nivida Drivers 56.72

What should have my settings at to help with performance?

Thanks

You can probably crank up the graphics options and FSAA with that card, as you are most likely CPU-limited. There's not much you can do to improve the performance with that CPU, so just live with what you have, which shouldn't be too bad.

I've noticed on my briefing maps in the mission planner, that they are usually bugged. The terrain is messed up, divided into disporportional triangles, some blacked out. Other times, it doesn't show terrain. The terrain will be distorted and divided into the wrong scale of squares. Any fixes?

I've heard of (and seen) the map going completely black, but never corruption like that. All I can suggest is restarting the sim.

Talon,
I've had the same thing happen to the map. The only workaround I've found is to move the map left, right, up or down, or resize it. It's a bit of a nuisance, but I guess you get used to it.

O.K. how about this for a new can of worms? Will Win98 support USB devices?

It sure will. Make sure you have any critical updates from Microsoft.

What does this have to do with graphics?

Hi there:
Well, I am one of those who had graphical probems with ATI 9800 pro, cat4.10 dr1vers and water problems in XP as many others. First posted a thread in Frugals world and there I get an answer of JuJu man. Well I followed all his advices and read this FAQ but no joy. What ever I do and tweek, with or without Radlinker, I had to disable the "Sparkling Water"and "Level Noise Mapping" to run F18 more or less normal.
Because I have dual boot, I decide to install FA18 under win98SE and that did the trick.
Graphic on max, res 1024*768 and absolutley no problems with game anymore. The only thing was the clean installation. It is not as complicated as F4 falcon but must be done right. So here is what I did.
Download:
a. HIBall cockpit update
b. K@OS Cougar file and F18key.INI
c. TSHv1H1.exe (Hi res.)
d. F/A18 Nocd exe
e. F/A 18_101F update

1. Install F/A 18
2. Install the FA18_up101F
3. Backup Ncape/Object folder
4. Install the HiBall cockpit (extract files in Ncape/Object folder)
5. Replace the F18.ini by the NO_CD FA18.exe
6. Rename the F18key.INI in F18key.old
7. Copy the K@OS F18keys.ini in the FA18 folder
8. Rename the F18MISC.INI in the Recource folder to F18MISC.old
9. Copy the K@OS F18MISC.INI in the Recource folder
10. Install TSHv1H1.exe
11. Open TSH installer and tac all you want, hit apply
12. Run FA18
13. Go to Options
13. Go to Control
14. Select K@OS TM Cougar
15. Go back to the Main screen
16. Select Tools
17. Select Pilot / Squadron edit
18. Create new pilot

Take off.
This is about it, except if you do not have a cougar, drop all the K@OS related steps.
It seems, that ATI will not resolve this problem because all the ati drivers up to now has this graphical problem in XP.
Happy flying
Nicolaas