fatkat357

How well does SF2 fly using either an HD 4550 or a Geforce 9500GT? It's not so much a price problem as a PSU problem - I'm not upgrading my power supply and want a card that is spec'd to my Inspiron 530's PSU.

It will probably be a come-down. I played CFS2 last summer and had a ball. I then tried playing Sturmovik - what an incredibly demanding sim (by comparison, of course). If you can get around just getting off the ground, to say nothing of getting back and finishing a mission, then that's way ahead of CFS2.

First combat sim was the original Falcon in the fall of 1987. I remember getting it and reading the instruction book cover to cover over the weekend. (Yeah, I know this dates me.) About a year or so later, I trued Sublogic's jet, thinking it was way more advanced because the framerate was much smoother. At the time, I flew using a keyboard - first joystick was CH's Flightstick about 2 years later. The idea of being freed from the keys (if only for just pitch & roll) was incredible. By then, I got my copy of "Their Finest Hour" - graphics was CGA at the time. I remember wondering why some planes burned and others actually exploded. Around the time I got TFH, there actually was a television miniseries about the battle of Britain - "Piece of Cake" on Masterpiece Theater. One of the pilots loses power because his Spit still has wooden props. I'm thinking - okay, he can glide just like the Spitfires on TFH. Those were the first and - for a while - the last sims I could get into. More sims used VGA and soon became demanding in other ways. Though I did get a VGA card in '92, the onslaught of games with even higher system requirements meant I either needed a new system or would have fewer trips to Software Etc. Falcon 3.0 was pretty much the nail in the coffin - it did run on my system (a 286) but barely. I had hoped to make Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe run, but it do was unplayable. My next new computer was a Pentium 166mmx in '97. The first thing I did was buy a lot of older games - "Aces of the Pacific", "X Wing" & Hind. those were either great years to get into sims or bad ones. It was easy to find not-so-old games for real cheap - like a bundle containing Falcon 3, Fleet Defender, Gunship 2000 and one other game in one box that Software Etc sold for about a dollar, or one that had Hornet 3.0, Flight Unlimited and a couple of others in a budget CD-Game section of a "99 cents or less" store. By then I had little time for sims. I'd look at these games and remember how much gameplay I squeezed out of TFH or Falcon and wonder where these games had been...

The trick to learning a sim is to try at it - it's like exercise, you have to find something about it that motivates you. I remember the old EF2000 years back. It was a great sim and a fun game for its time but I couldn't get into it. I'd fly around on the training missings, maybe do the "scramble" mission now and then but nothing really dragged me back and do the campaign mode. One day I decided to try a smartbomb mission (the target was a hydroelectric dam). For some reason, completing that mission suddenly made the game much more interesting. Instead of just flying around and zapping-till-I-get-zapped, now gameplay has a point: finish the mission by achieving goals. Taking that I finally gave campaign mode a try and everything that seemed complicated for me at the time suddenly began becoming second nature.