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?