Official Formula 1 Racing - fast key presses and CD-Lock handling
Window hooker to run fullscreen programs in window and much more...
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Hi - the game Official F1 Racing from Eidos (1998) works great in Dxwnd except for an issue that when the in the main menu or in the pit change menu durign a race, the keyboard key presses just seem too extreme and fast and so its extremely hard to cycle through options to get the right one. same issue actually in a race when trying to change driver views - you have to try and tap the key in the lighttest possible way and even then it will speed through all options that you have to spend som etime trying to get the right result.
is ther a way to slow down how the game is registering keyboard presses?
no ideas on this one? i have tried using Rivatuner to limit fps to 30, but that doesnt change how the game reacts to keyboard presses. Oddly no such issues occur with steering the car, its just with trying to navigate menus
As soon as I finish with SimGolf (hopefully soon) I'll try this one.
But the solution should not depend on the FPS, it seems rater a keyboard configuration, maybe it's possible to reduce the speed of the generation of keypressed messages ....
@agathosdaimon
Can you send your DxWnd profile? Because here, when I hover over System in the Menu, it starts to freeze. Also the sound is pretty bad. The main menu works normally. Did you apply any patches?
P.S.
D3D or SW?
Last edit: huh 2026-03-01
The problem is easily replicated here, a single arrow click usually moves to the second next choice, so it is difficult to select what you want.
I don't remember well if it was a game that worked fine with a 60FPS lock
You have good memory: setting FPS limitation at 60 Hz and the keyboard works perfectly.
cool i will try that thanks - as for the sound, that is something i have never been able to fix, the car engine sounds are still okay, but music and voiceover is all a bit reverby
i read the help section on what the Hz delay does but i still dont understand it, and why 60?
attached are my two profiles for the game. I have a bin/cue cd image i use also for the game - i found there are some isos and mdf versions online of the game that do not work when i try to play the game using them and result in crashes. The bin/cue version works perfectly.
As for the 60hz fix, i just did that for both the 3DFX VERSION (hw) and the software mode (i love old games that provided a good software mode ) and it changes absolutely nothing. The menus still click through too fast when i press keys - its not impossible to use the menus, but i just takes more time to deal with a key press always causing the options to skip by that might be attached to that that key.
I notice also though with the 60hz setting, the menu music is now gone entirely. Granted it was garbled before, but i wouldnt say this fixes the issue by removing it altogether.
When you driving if you hit the home key (or 7 on the numberpad - that key is both on my laptop) does it switch to another cockpit view once with each key press, or does it cycle through all the view options right away and make it hard to set?
3dfx version wouldn't do anything because it is handled through nGlide or dgVoodoo2, whatever you use. You have to use their frame limiter.
About the menu music, I think I only have faint memories of that happening .
You can check if the game is really running in 60fps by enabling Video/FPS counter - overlay/titlebar(not recommended if it crashes the game). Test it on Software mode.
@agathosdaimon
Hmm, that's interesting. I couldn't get SW mode to work, I only tried D3D. In SW mode, I only got a black screen. Now I see that the trick is to disable Early hook, but then maybe some tricks won't work. It should be investigated. The System item in the Menu still causes the game to freeze here. I see what you mean. On the Input tab, I enabled Hook dinput and Flush GetAsyncKeyState, but it doesn't seem to be much better. Maybe it needs Early Hook, but the game doesn't run with it (d3d does).
its another case of just the wide variation always of everyones pcs that make one thing work on one systme and not on another. I have the game using my intel graphics card and nglide (installation process allows you to choose either d3d or 3dfx or both for the hardware option) . i dont need to use dgvoodoo on this game fortunately.
Two quick comments (I'm busy now, I'll get back later)
1) I can't run the SW version too, I get blocked at the game start
2) the HW version works but it has nothing to share with 3DFX VooDoo, it uses DirectDraw D3D, maybe because I picked the DirectX option in the game installer.
SW mode works for me, but only without Early hook. The D3D version works for me with Early Hook (only if I click on System in the Menu, the game freezes), but the key response is too fast, as described by @agathosdaimon.
i tried some of the nglide settings for the 3dfx mode to see if that altered key presses but nothing.
also now the music seems gone even after i removed the timing settings. its a shame as the music tracks for the game on the cd are really great. I wish the sound functioned properly perhaps even more than the key press issue now
Hmm, I had major sound issues in the menu, so I uploaded dsound.dll from Reactos 0.4.3 or 0.4.4 to the game folder, and that fixed the sounds. I'm not at home right now, so I can't check, but I think it's the one I attached.
I don't know anything about music, but I haven't tried ripping sound files and using them with DxWnd yet. Also, I assume that without Early hook, a lot of flags won't work, but sw mode doesn't work with Early hook.
interesting - i put that dsound.dll file in the game folder and with that in there, neither the HW or SW modes work for me. The just doesnt even start. As soon as i remove that dll then the game is back to working for me, albeit still with the garbled sound
I'll check it tonight when I get home.
@agathosdaimon :
Could you post here the .cue file of your CD image? I wish to check if there are supposed to be audio tracks. If you open the .cue file with a text editor (like notepad) you could check also by yourself. In case there are audio tracks it would be useful to get the full .cue/.bin image.
well all i can say is that i mounted the cd image when i had itunes open
and itunes picked up on a cd with music tracks being present and was
offering to copy the tracks and add then to my itunes library. if you can
provide me with an email address i could send over the cue image privately
Last edit: gho 2026-03-02
The game SW version has several oddities. For me it never worked in window mode, the logs show that the game keeps changing its window size and after a time it surrenders and terminates.
Another oddity is that the SW version includes some privileged instructions, though the exception handler should be able to fix them.
To run the HW version in a relocatable RIP configuration, it is necessary to define a fake CD (H: in my case) and then add these virtual registry keys:
Funnily enough, I seem only to have the game work best in a windowed mode
in dxwnd and both sw and he are windowed for me and I can resize the
windows too. If though I do some other operation outside the game then the
game window crashes but apart from that it's very stable for me
Last edit: gho 2026-03-02
@agathosdaimon :
Old CRT monitors had an internal refresh rate, the electronic beam was swiping the video surface lighting the pixels at a given frequency. I suppose to avoid interference with the illumination lights (specially neon tubes) the screen refresh rate was identical to the AC frequency, that is 50Hz in Europe and 60Hz in USA. Most games were working in sync with that frequency and expected to draw video frames 50 or 60 times per second. With the advent of flat LED monitors the frequency is no longer an issue (there is no electronic beam) and can run at whatever speed they like (the more the better?) but legacy programs may perform well at their original refresh rate.
That said, I saw an improvement with the 60Hz capping, before it was almost impossible to advance a single item in the menus, now pressing gently and quickly the operation is easy. But you may try capping at 50Hz, maybe that would work better.
In Win7, the game has an entry in the MS shim database, and it is precisely the ignoring of illegal instructions (I don't know exactly what it's called, I'm not at home). With NoSHIMS + Handle exception, the game works fine (D3D). For @agathosdaimon, sw mode works because Early hook is disabled.