DTM / Toca 2 - Some confusion

[dabbelju]

Hi folks,

DTM2 is pulling my hair out. Here is my story:
I have three machines available, office pc, games pc and a laptop. DTM runs on all three of them with the original disk (after uninstalling daemon etc..). However, trying to get rid of the disc check my success is limited.

NCRYSO: Have replaced the exe, reset the drivers, even used the sf removal tool. NCRYSO hangs when I press "start game". The last info on screen is "writing serial (refer to NFO)". Happens on the games pc and the laptop. It used to work two or three times on the office pc, but the graphics card in that machine is ***, so I did not really continue in that direction. Meanwhile NCRYSO stopped to work on the office pc, too, don't ask me why.

Star****: Works only on the laptop where the only optical drive is on the second ide channel. The other machines have optical drives on primary. Disconnecting helps. However, working means that I can start the game and am usually able to start a race (sometimes the game freezes with the track loading screen on display). Sometimes I can play for 5 minutes, sometimes for an hour, but after that time the frame rate goes down to 1-2fps. Task manager tells me stur****.exe is eating 80-90% cpu time. At that point I have to restart the machine, quitting the game alone will not help. I have used sf 0.81 in the beginning and upgraded to sf 0.83. With 0.83 I can play longer, but the issue is not solved


I have tried various combinations of dtm 1.0, 1.2, ncryso and sf 0.81, 0.82 on the different machines.

Questions:

1. Is there any solution for the "writing game serial" hangs?
2. Is there any solution for the sf cpu hunger?
3. What sf version is in place? Some people say *.49, others say *.63. I have tried both.
4. Is there any auto-via-internet-update in sf? Sometimes the results of my attempts were not reproducable, e.g. that NCRYSO stopped to work on the office machine
5. Does it make a difference which mini-image to use? I know how to adapt the sku setting in the registry, but maybe star****.exe's cpu hunger is related to an incorrect image?
6. What is the deal with the serials? My understanding is that the serial is related to the disc series you have. Some people do not seem to need a serial at all.

Any answers are greatly appreciated.


Yours,
Dabbelju