Unfortunately, LB2 is a very strange game in that almost everyone we come across has a different set of issues with trying to run it on modern systems. Phoenix's fixes helped me greatly, at first, but I also get that CTD after every mission when running in 3DFX mode. Me and another guy or two did actually narrow that particular CTD down to the fact that we are using USB joysticks, strangely enough - as when you don't have the joystick plugged in, you don't get the crash. Why it affects 3DFX mode only though, is weird. Or does it affect the other modes too? I can't remember now.

But of course, you just have to have a joystick to play LB2. Just for an experiment, unplug your joystick and see if you don't get the CTD after a mission (you don't actually have to do the mission, just enter it then quit).

Some people (like me) do in fact get a rather rudimentary implementation of VRS in LB2, on modern systems. It was one of the things that finally made me give up with the sim, every time I tried to come to a hover and lowered my collective a bit, I'd go into a mad uncontrollable VRS. Must be something to do with the in-game mechanics cycling too fast.

D3D is definitely pretty darn stable. I've just been switching that back and forth in the CA.ini to test, so I don't have to re-copy the D3D file every time after it changes it with the utility. nGlide and the older dgVoodoo files of mine are about the same. The new Phoenix dgVoodoo files at their default were worse than the other two glide methods I tried, until I tried setting it to 16bit color on both pages. Now it is more stable than the other two. I remember some setting like that also being necessary in JF-15. Still not quite at D3D 640x480 stable, but I can run it at 1366x768 and finish a mission most of the time without it crashing. Still occasional rapid button presses and shift/ctrl/alt sticking or CTDs, but playable. Ctrl-alt-delete and alt-tab are things likely to increase CTD, though previously with glide they always produced CTD.

The sim seems not to like being run (or doesn't require) as Admin.

When doing some of the single missions, I found it feeling like it was running at X2, though. When going over 80kts things happened very fast. I don't remember it doing that before, but I'm not sure it ever ran this well outside of Window 98 and D3D... when it was freakishly fluid and lite feeling. This isn't quite like that, but there's something definitely fast about it. I still need to test rockets.

Oh and I gave up on Blackshark for this laptop. The Shkval issue must be some glitch related to integrated graphics and Windows 7. It had nothing to do with any of my LOD settings or graphics mods. I did get the fps to around 20-30fps, but not being able to close within 3km now without objects disappearing is a dealbreaker. Too bad.

How is D3D looking on your rig? I always got those artifacts from Hellfire motor smoke that would cut up my 2D cockpit. Plus other minor gripes such as the canopy glass having a shiny mirror-look in external view. I also think the game runs faster by default in D3D, as it can make full use of the power of your graphics card, unhindered. When running 3DFX through a glide wrapper, you can turn on VSync to slow things down a bit and essentially limit the framerate.

If you haven't seen it already, take a look at my Display Mode Comparison page:
http://digitality.comyr.com/flyboy/lb2/gfx/gfx.html

Holy Helos!! I have never even TRIED to run LB2 in other than 3DFX (with Glide Wrapper or on previous machines with 3DFX cards). Based on your screenshots, D3D looks MIGHTY GOOD and software doesn't even look too bad.

Hmmm. My D3D versions never looked anywhere near the same planet as the Glide version. It was revelatory when we got the wrapper utility and configuration going back when.

Recluse - You're correct that D3D doesn't look bad at all, but in motion there are a few annoying things like those 'artifacts' I mentioned above. And I actually kinda prefer Software mode for the terrain, as it is more pixellated and seems to make it more 'noisy' and less smoothed out - just as you would expect the ground to be.

Eugene - The problem with the D3D version is that you have to really play around with the Display Driver Update and select the right preset configuration for your graphics card. Gone are the days when not only did we have to select which graphics mode to use, but also which type of graphics card we had! Varying results could be seen in D3D, and to be honest it was rather poorly implemented at best.

One thing that I always found strange, is the fact that the LB2 demo had a graphics mode selector - yet, with the full game, we had to wait for the patch and DDU before we could change graphics mode.