Windows7 problems

[braveheart77521]

Fellow CFS2 comrades

My wife gave me a new Dell Computer for Christmas. I downloaded my CFS2 onto the computer, which is Windows7. It is the home premium edition. I have solved the user problem by making myself the administrator. However, I am having trouble with the down view, especially the details of a bombsight. Is there special settings needed in CFS2 to help this problem? I am using the original video card that came with the computer. Could this be the problem? If I access the bombsight or some side views, the little circular curasor turns black, like its not downloading.
Has anyone experienced these problems and found a solution? Please let me know.

Braveheart

[simonu]

braveheart, your wife, gave you a new computer for christmas, on which to play CFS2!!!

You ARE a lucky fellow, to have such a wife.

Have you tried right clicking the CFS2.exe icon and selecting "Run AS Administrator" from the context menu?

When you say " I downloaded my CFS2 onto the computer"
do you mean you copied an install from an old machine or a back up file in order to preserve addon content etc? let us assume this is the case.

Win7 is heavy on security, with good reason.
It does not like programs that write files in the Program Files area. Especially programs that are copied into the Prgrams Files area rather than installed there.

The modern way of doing things is to have programs write to files in the Users Home folder.

CFS2 does not do this, it dates back to windows98!
So
An install of CFS2 that is rescued from an old computer is best copied to and run from your own User folder.

If you don't know what Im on about, files and folders and that, don't worry.

The absolute best way is to keep Your CFS2 installs on an external USB2 hard drive. They should run from there with no problems.

This is all assuming the CFS2 install and addon content was working OK on your previous machine.

[Wulf190]

Brave Heart. I run Windows 7 64bit pro, and I have the same issues. I do not know what is the cause of it, but Windows 7 does not like any 2D panel view in CFS2. I have the same issues you are suffering from when I try to fly an aircraft that has a rear view 'mirror'. DBolt's Stock Corsair revamp, and Merlin66's Spitfires come to mind.

The only 'fix' that I know of is to remove the offending 2D panel view and go on with out it. But this means that you would lose your bomb sight.

I'm running a Nvidia GTX460 1GB model with 258.96 drivers. If I try a 'newer' driver set CFS2's performance drops big time, and is even worse if I hit 'Q' to quiet the sim (can crawl down to 8FPS). Why I do not know for certain.

My best guess is that most of the issues with CFS2 are all wrapped up in the fact that CFS2 is going on 11 years old and was built to run on DirectX 7.0 and Windows 95/98. Windows 7 is comes with DirectX 11, and does not have the backwards compatibility to properly fully support CFS2, from what I understand.

Now CFS2 does run on Windows 7. Best perfromance seems to be in 'window' mode, as full screen has stutters and does not display my resolution properly. I never had the issue with XP, or when I was running 98 years ago.

I am thinking of buying a separate HDD (they are dirt cheap), installing Windows XP Pro on to it, and running CFS2 from there.

I hate nurfing things in my favorite sim just to get it to 'basically run'.

[simonu]

ah, now try this for 2d panel problems,
check the offending panel.cfg
window definitions

example

[Window00]

includes the following line

render_3d_window=1

[Wulf190]

I looked in to Dbolt's F4U-1C corsair and looked at the review mirror entry. It does have the entry of. render_3d_window=1. But the hanging issue still exists.