The most useless and pointless request ever

[ismael]

Hello, this will be the most useless and pointless request ever and, as far as I understand of GP2 programming, an impossible one.

"Monaco came under pressure over its insistence on a four-day format plus a choice of May weekend, but its deal is said by multiple sources to have been extended following talks which were far from easy. The principality has therefore agreed to abandon its unique format which sees practice begin on Thursday and no F1 track action on Friday.

From next season its event will adopt the same Friday to Sunday format of every other round."

https://www.racefans.net/2021/09/18/f1s ... o-weekend/

So, is it possible to change "Thursday" to "Friday" in the Free Practice and Qualifying of slot 4?

[MaxX]

Hi Ismael,

I had the same need some years ago. I just openeded GP2.exe with a hexeditor and searched for the word Thursday and patched it with Friday. I think there where 2 ocurrencies or so. You might have to add some "blank" lines afterwards. You have to patch the whole phrase and append a blank at the end -> so "Thursday Free Practice" gets "Friday Free Practice ". It works the same way like patching the year in difficulty level and at season end.

EDIT: Wohoo, post nr. 999, we are writing history here

[ismael]

Hi MaxX,

Amazing! Thanks for the note - although for me, personally, that requires too much effort. But I'm glad to understand that an hexeditor allows that degree of editing in GP2.exe.

Next you're going to tell me that the hexeditor also allows to suppress Friday qualifying, or to turn the Saturday qualifying into a sprint race!

(The specialized media did not mention 2 important details, lately. First, that we just witnessed the first Friday qualifying sessions this year since 1995; Second, that Verstappen and Hamilton clashed in Silverstone and Monza, the same way Hill and Schumacher did in 1995).

If you're willing to reply to my crazy "sprint race" suggestion, that would do your 1000th post

[MaxX]

For such things a Hex-Editor is just perfect

The other change would not be that easy I suppose, at least I don`t have any clue how to solve that without deeper patching or fiddling with source-code (which I don`t think is available)

As workaround you could use Excel as "Season"-Tool and within that you could have the sprint race as non championship race with reduced race length and patched qual-powers so that you get the exact starting grid for the full-race. You can also add extra points for fastest lap and so on.

To make my 1.000th post a little bit more relevant, I will attach the Excel I used for the Championship with my relaunched personal carset (currently not released). With a little bit of editing (F1- Points, 20 races, the sprints and points for fastest lap) you can use it as template for a 2021 season. The primary reason I additionally used the Excel besides the 16 races was Information like (reason out if classified, lap charts, etc.)

I use a virtual XP machine with Office 2003, so this is an xls-File. For security reasons I have also attached the Hash-Value of my version. My version doesn`t include an makros.

SHA-256 HASH of the xls-file:
acaf9af874968e1f4e7be91a36a51b27f6e13c0a54893f84074548e109de995a

[ismael]

Thanks (and congrats for the 1000th ) I'll surely give it a try.

May I ask how does your Windows XP works? When you say "virtual", you mean some sort of emulator, or is it a partition, a root-installed OS allowing you to choose to start with WinXP or Win10 whenever you feel like?

[MaxX]

10 years ago, I used vmware workstation to install a virtual XP. At that time granprix2 didn`t work with dos window (it still doesn`t) but D-FEND reloaded works great there. I also set the CPU and RAM settings withing vmware to fit for a high-end PC of Win XP-Era and only had to tweak D-FEND reloaded once to get it to work perfectly using GP2Lap. Of course the machine is not connected to the internet any more, but drag and drop within vmware workstation or simple mapping of the virtual hard disks are pretty easy.

Since there I have always migrated the machine to current version (which is 16 at the moment) and also switched the hardware of the host three times, but GP2 always works without tweaking anything or showing up with new problems. Furthermore I have no problems running the editors, tools and other utilities in XP and can always use the familiar graphic tools for GP2 stuff.

I am pretty happy with that setting

As backup I also have kept a Lenovo W500 Notebook (XP, 7 and Linux Triple Boot, where I can play all old games of that era in true XP. Within that I use VDMSound and a CPU-Killer, which toasts 75% performance so GP" runs with GP2Lap perfectly. Somewhere I also have an old gaming tower in a cupboard at my parents house, if dug out it also can run GP2.

But of course using the VM is most convinient.

[ismael]

Thanks a lot for this tip. I'm consdering a new laptop but in the meantime I'm discovering VMware Workstation and its abilities... I'll give it a serious thought! VMware Workstation seems like the "permanent time-travelling portal" I've been thinking of.

[MaxX]

Indeed, having all the classic games (PC, consoles, whatever) ready to go is very appealling. And if running once, it`s working everywhere. They also improve 3D-Support, so some games which made trouble (for instance UT2004) are working smoothly are whereas other ones (Risen) still not perfect. vmware workstation is expensive and targeting mainly companies, I get the upgrades to next version on Black Friday sales or similar events, the full price is way to much in my oppinion.

It depends on your use case, maybe free alternatives like virtualbox might also be worth a try? Ten years ago I was a part-time student additonally to my job so I got the stuff at very good students price and didn`t try virtualbox.