Interstate '76

What works

- The installation works fine

- The game runs fine in fullscreen mode

- Sound works, graphics are acceptable (all at highest settings), joystick works, etc.

What does not

- When entering the control config menu, the error "The device you chosen is not configured properly" (sic.) pops up.  This does not seem to affect anything though.

- While running the game, a lot of warnings are generated by wine32:

- The sound effects are choppy at times

- Taurus's car has "funky" wheels (it seems to wobble all the time, which is annoying because it makes him go very slowly).  This seems to be the biggest issue at the moment, and I have really no clue what could be causing it.

- I can't manage to get IP host/join multiplayer to work.  Null modem multiplayer seems to work (don't forget to create a COM1 device and change permissions on your /dev/ttyS0).  To be fair, there aren't many ANET servers out there anymore, and I don't recall ever having managed to connect to one of them, even on windows.

Workarounds

What was not tested

IPX and dial-up modem support (but who still uses those?)

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

- I run the game in "Windows 95" compatibility mode; this was the dominant Windows version at the time the game was released. - I applied the NoCD patch - The i76 map builder seems to work too

A few remarks:

* Installing the game doesn't require any workarounds (both the gold version and original release)

* The game has quite a few artifacts when run on fast (modern) computers:
  - AI players have `wobbling' wheels
  - Clouds move too fast
  - Camera turns too fast when blown up
  - Mortars flicker
  - etc.
Some of these problems seem to disappear when run in a higher/lower resolution mode, but even on windows there doesn't seem to be a definite solution for these issues (other than slowing down the machine).

* The gold version (or original game with gold patch applied) gives the option of playing the game with Direct3D, Rendition, Glide or PowerVR instead of software rendering.  Direct3D is limited to 640x480, and causes a page read fault on wine, so is to be avoided.  To run the game with Glide, you can use the dgVoodoo2 wrapper, which can be found on http://dege.freeweb.hu, or the nGlide wrapper, http://www.zeus-software.com/downloads/nglide/  PowerVR and Rendition don't have any compatibility wrapper as far as I know.  Anyway, I can't say that glide rendering looks any better than the default software mode, but it might solve the artifacts listed above.  You can select the rendering mode, either by launching the game with "splash.exe", or by passing the right argument to i76.exe (-glide, -d3d, etc.).

* If the sound effects contain jitter, try disabling any hardware acceleration options

* The control setup menu can throw an error when opening, but you can also modify the INPUT.xxx/KEYBOARD.MAP files directly

* The cdda music and cutscenes don't seem to work for now.  Most likely this is because the game doesn't detect the cd.

* A force-feedback patch is available (I haven't tried that)

* If all of the above would fail:
  - There is a BF2 mod called "Interstate Nitro" which resembles this game
  - There is a remake called "Interstate Outlaws", based on the Unity3D engine