Luckily it got installed while I was jogging. ;-). That's what I love, no need for maintenance by myself.

What bothers me is that Steam stops downloading while you are playing. I wonder why it does that, as you can manually start the downloads again with no problems.

I think that feature dates back to when it was primarily a multiplayer platform, but yeah, it's stupid. On the other hand, there are some games that do not interrupt your downloads; makes me think there's a poorly documented parameter somewhere in Steamworks triggering this.

Still adding to this Interstate '76 case, as I re-ignited my interest to replay it:

To be more precise, it seems to be the problem is not directly about the CPU speed, but the framerate at which the game runs. It seems the game wants to run at around 25 fps or something, before the flamethrower and mortar guns behave correctly(?).

Yesterday I tested those guns with the I'76 instant action option, and the only way I could make those guns work (apparently) correctly was to run the game on my old single-core ThinkPad T41, and even there use CPU Grapper to slow it down even futher. So as soon as the I76 game slowed down so much that it started the become a bit jerky, the flamethrower would finally be able to reach a bit longer to make actual damage to nearby enemies.

So it seems the game is simply designed so that you have to play it at pretty low framerates, if you want those two weapon types work correctly. Smooth framerates or ability to use those two weapons (types), pick your poison.

And now I am wondering, did those two weapons work correctly even back when I played the game the first time in 1998-1999 or so? If I remember correctly, I finished the game back them without using these two weapons at all, possibly because they worked erratically already then? Hard to remember, but I think I found the machine guns and such much more usable anyway (especially the autoturret against the helicopters).

This, to me, says that it's a design flaw / bug, and not something one can expect GOG to fix (other than perhaps to force it to run at 25fps). I remember playing other games back then that were more or less tied to what they (for some reason) thought were as fast as the computer would run (in the time frame they'd be offering support), the frequency of vertical refreshes etc etc. Most of them tried to squeeze out every last drop from your CPU (and/or GPU) by using all sorts of hacks. That's the thing about "clever" coding - if you're "the only one" being "clever", pretty soon it becomes a bug.

I've been sometimes thinking whether this kind of coding will become more commonplace, because so many titles are first made for consoles (where you can expect all units to run at exactly the same speed), and then ported to PC, where you'd have to take the different speeds/setups into account again.

That used to be true, but with most processors supporting either SpeedStep or Cool 'n' Quiet there's really no reason why the gog installer can't install a script to throttle back the processor to something that works

Or at least offer it up as an option.
I'm guessing what happened there is that they aren't making proper use of the clock and were counting on the processor to take a certain amount of time in order to complete whatever operation. An if it got out of order then things started to break.

For a game of i76 vintage, it's inexcusable for them to not have put in place provisions to deal with that aspect of the game.

I just want to state that this is exactly how GOG is coming across to me. :) GOG is one of the very, very few shops where I feel respected, and treated like a mature being, and where I feel that I can actually _trust_ the official statements instead having to constantly hunt the fine print for backdoors.

I'm playing video games for more than 30 years now. During that time, I was confronted with some of the most detestable marketing ploys I have ever witnessed. I have also grown somewhat allergic against this very simple pattern of "usual" marketing behavior, which consists of a) always painting everything in the most positive light, b) never admitting any fault (if it's too obvious to deny, they simply stay silent), c) expecting customers to forget what was said four months ago, and d) trying to word statements in ways that they seem customer-friendly while putting backdoors into them. In fact, I have grown increasingly cynical about marketing in computer games and related businesses.

However, despite my skepticism, GOG has managed to make me _trust_ them. And this wasn't easy - but you managed it, by continually surpassing my expectations in nearly every situation when something customer-unfriendly happened. On several occasions, I expected you to take the easy route, but you didn't. You seem determined to build an atmosphere of respect and mutual trust between you and your customers. I consider this as very rare, very precious, and very much worth of supporting.

So, since this thread seems to focus on the negatives, I wanted to take the opportunity to thank you for maintaining an approach that must be much harder to maintain than simply following the "regular" marketing approach that I outlined above. Thanks!

I think it's a bit more complicated than that.

1) The target CPU for I'76 was the 486 (33 or better) and Pentium (90 or better), with the Pentium MMX 233 being top of the line at that time. My old i7 can be slowed down (through software) to 1.6GHz (on each core), which is still almost 50 times faster than the minimum requirement (486/33), and almsot 7 times faster than the Pentium 233. That's not all, though; on more modern CPUs each (complex) instruction takes less cycles to complete, as well as having better pipeline architecture, out-of-order exceution logic etc, making the actual speed-up a lot larger. The main focus has been on operations used in, among other things, 3D calculations, skewing this picture even more. As an example, an algorithm I wrote for the 486 back in the days spent ~2200 cycles on each iteration; five or six years later the same implementation used less than 1500. This together with increased frequency made it quite a lot faster. Today it'll likely be less than 1000 (although optimizing it for today's CPUs would probably make it less than 4-500 if not better).

2) Not every CPU can easily be throttled back, or they require different ways of doing it. Some may even be "damaged" (as in the wear is significantly disproportionate to the actual use, or risk of damage through overheating). The only(?) way to give users a uniform experience is to ship the game with emulation software of some kind. While this is technically possible as modern computers are that much faster, it might not be a viable option considering the costs.

3) The CPU speed is likely not even the main problem; the frame rate is, or rather, the frequency of vertical refreshes. By slowing down the CPU, doing calculations and drawing of one screenful may take long enough to make it "work", but if the real problem is that some things (e.g. length of flame burst) is calculated in frames (with upper and lower cut-offs most likely), it's a poor solution. Of course, given that the source code is unavailable, it might be the only option - timing issues are very difficult to "fix" without rewriting the offending part of the code.

The way I see it, GOG has the choice of not selling such a game at all, or sell it the way it is; flaws and all. In the latter case (which is the reality with I'76 for instance) I would prefer some statement to the effect of "sorry, guys, this is as good as we can make it - you may try tweaking things yourself, but we can't be held responsible for any problems that may cause", but this doesn't seem to be GOG's style. Which is one of the very few issues I have with GOG - I understand why they don't want to say negative stuff about their products, but only a fool would think any piece of software is without flaws, so I'd prefer knowing more about what flaws there are before purchasing. I wouldn't think any less of GOG's products because of it - quite the contrary.

They stop downloading because people care about ping and Windows sucks. The weird thing is I think they stop downloading even when you start a single player only game.

But if I care about ping I may stop downloads manually with 1 click...

It pisses me off that I need to minimize the game and start the downloading. I think most of the people while waiting for some 10 GB game to download like to launch some indie title instead of just waiting like a moron staring at download progress bar...

Dude, I totally agree with you, I just believe that's their rationale, however bad it may be.

Who wants to sit there with their thumb up their ass waiting for Batman AC to download? No one, that's who!

Well, before I switched out my 4850, I went into the Catalyst Control Center and maxed out all those graphic options and made a profile for I76, then I ditched GOG's dgVoodoo shortcuts and downloaded nGlide. I think GOG already forces the .exe to use one core too. To my surprise the wheels acted normal, the ai acted normal, and the weapons acted normal. It was like it brought the framerate down enough for everything to be fixed and the game ran smooth still. Occasionally the flamethrower would be short for a moment but it would quickly shoot back out.

However I messed something up and had to reinstall. I got a different card now so I've been curious so see if I can get it working like that again. It was 95% perfect.

Could you do something like with the initial LBA release and tantalize us with doodles? :)

Btw. problem still there. Devs could maybe have a look on monday morning.