Folks,

A friend bought me a copy of a special commemorative edition of Garson Kanin's award winning film "The True Glory". It is an audio and video celebration of D-Day. There are tons of archival footage and lotsa music of the period. I couldn't wait to pop it into the DVD player.

Alas, the grand kids are visiting this weekend and that usually means the seven dwarfs, Bambi or Dumbo are likely to be hogging the player. No sweat, I came in here, put disk one in the DVD/CD/CDRW drive and fired up Windows Media Player. When that choked and rudely suggested that I lower my resolution and my color settings and try again, I suspected rightly that I was in for trouble. Who knew that when you get XP you have to pay extra for a DVD player and codec? Thanks Bill. I see why you're one of the richest men in the world.

Anyhow I got on the Internet and downloaded something free called "Real Alternative" that was supposed to play DVDs. It did. Unfortunately although talkies came in 70 years ago there was no sound. Nothing I did corrected the problem. I thought about it for a split second and then I loaded the control panel and gave "Real Alternative" the boot.

Suddenly it dawned on me, yes it was an epiphany, because this is a Dell computer there must be a DVD player hiding on a disk somewhere cunningly disguised as a DVD player. I looked. I found and I installed. Now all is just yummy.

After watching 120 minutes of my gift DVD I had lunch and then I popped the Bob movie into the drive. I never tire of watching that movie. I watched 95% of it before I was irresistibly forced to drag out the joystick and load BoB2.

Thanks in part to friends here and over at A2A, I am doing rather well with BoB2 in spite of my system's short comings. Today, I flew a one on one quick mission, this time with weather set to high and mission weather set to fair. Yes, I know I can't do that without twirling a black cat round my head at midnight in a graveyard and paying for an expensive upgrade. But I'll be darned if I had any problems at all. No indeedy. Thus encouraged, I took on a flock of He-111s from the rear (where else) with great success. We chased them right through all those here-to-for unseen but incredibly realistic, billowing white clouds. It was almost just like in the movie.

Let me shamelessly brag. I have no reason to do it very often you see. I got one of the bombers and sent another off with smoke pouring from its port engine. I sprayed several more of the behemoths with .303s before taking on a slippery 109 that had slipped up on me from behind and sent his red-hot calling card zinging past my starboard wing root. I took this as an un-friendly invitation to play and so off we went, guns blazing through those towering cumulus.

What a glorious sim this is. Would that my system had the power to take full advantage of all the options. I found this 109 to be an exceptionally good opponent. He boomed and he zoomed and every time I let my guard down he admonished me by putting another brand new hole in my lovely Spitfire.

At long last he zoomed when he should have boomed and I found myself sitting right on his six and climbing. I put the pipper on his little gray arse and I let him have it. A few of my shots must have hit his engine for he took to his chute and tumbled past me. Do two extended fingers mean the same in German as they do in English?

Listen you folks like moi with older, weaker systems. There is hope. I do not know why Bob2 runs for me. It just does. I have BoB on a separate drive from my OS and that drive is less than half full. That drive is also kept un-fragmented. I do not know if any of this helps in any way. With a PC nothing is standard and you never know. Everyone's configuration is different.

I do know that the bright sparks scratching their heads and wringing their hands over on the friendly A2A forum keep telling me Bob2 shouldn't be running this well for me. Especially since the 2.09 patch does not even support my video card anymore and although I am running DX 9c, I'm told that my card is not DX 9 compliant. Since I have DX9c installed and since it is running, I assume that means that my card simply cannot take advantage of all the wizard things DX9c is capable of like shading.

Whatever the case may be, I am pleased to be able to climb into a Spitfire once more and head up into the clouds in search of dark and deadly swarms of the determined foe.


Originally Registered January,2001 Member Number 3044

"Blessed are they who expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed" - Edmond Gwenn, "The Trouble With Harry"

CELEBRATING EIGHTEEN YEARS and over 20 MILLION VIEWS on SNAFU's HWH thread- April 2019