Rally 2000
(full name: Mobil 1 British Rally Championship) Rally simulator from 1999 by Magnetic Fields. The game features 36 full-length rally stages and 22 cars from classes A5 to A8. The co-drivers are Derek Ringer and Claire Mole. Voice commentary is provided by Tony Mason.
The graphics and physics are extremely outdated by 2014 standards, don't expect RBR levels of physics.
Contents
Game overview
Stages
The game's main feature are the full-length stages of the 1998 Mobil 1 British Rally Championship recreated from Ordnance Survey maps, photographs and video footage as reference. Total length of all the stages is well over 600 kilometers in a variety of conditions (dawn/day/dusk/night; sun/overcast/rain/fog/snow). Surfaces include gravel, asphalt, mud and snow. All stages can be driven both ways - 'Arcade' mode stages are reversed versions of the 'Simulation' ones.
Cars
The Mobil 1 Championship mode features cars from classes A5, A6 and A7 and has separate class and overall leaderboards. Winning the Mobil 1 Championship (or using a cheat code) unlocks the A8 (WRC) class championship.
Damage
Cars take damage from collisions with objects, as well as from wear and tear. Amount of collision damage depends on what the car hits; a hay bale does pretty much no damage, a hedge does moderate damage and a stone wall does severe damage. Extreme jumps and rough driving can significantly damage the car as well.
Parts that can sustain damage include: engine, exhaust, turbo, cooling, clutch, differential, gearbox, body, electrics, lights, steering, suspension, brakes and tires. Different damaged parts have different effects on the car.
- A damaged engine will result in general loss of power and dark smoke coming from under the hood if the damage is serious.
- Damaged cooling results in engine overheating when revved up, causing more damage. If the engine overheats, white smoke will come out from the hood and the driver is advised to drive on low revs (under about 4kRPM for A8 cars, under about 5.5kRPM for the rest).
- Clutch damage causes gears to drop to neutral, making the engine hit the rev limiter when accelerating. Especially annoying when you are trying to nurse the engine from overheating.
- Differential damage makes the car not grip when sliding into turns
- Gearbox damage causes losing gears completely until repaired
- Severe body damage will result in losing parts of the car, including wheels
- If lights are damaged, they will start to flicker or not work at all
- Damaged steering will cause the car to veer to one side and in general handle worse
- Damaged suspension makes the car have less grip overall
- Worn out tires have less grip and heavily worn out tires are prone to punctures (which can be fixed with a 'small wheel of fortune' style mini-game after pulling over). Bad tire selection can cause less grip and increased wear.
Complete failure of some parts causes the race to end, while others allow you to continue (at least until the stage finish line). In order to be allowed to the next stage, the car has to pass the British MOT test. If the car does not pass the inspection, the driver is disqualified from the rally.
Repairs & Service areas
In Championship and Rally modes, after every few stages there is a service area where you can repair and set up the car. The time is limited and often you will not be able to repair all damage. In the Mobil 1 Championship you start every rally with a fully repaired car. In the A8 Championship, damage is carried over to the next round, so sparing the car at even the last stages of a round is much more important.
Different cars have different part robustness and different time values needed to repair/replace a certain part of the car. Some parts have fixed time values while others take the more time, the more damage they sustained.
Replay editor
The game features saving and editing replays with 40-ish cameras & angles to choose from.
Troubleshooting
Installation
Run RAL.EXE off the CD without admin privileges and install the game to a non-restricted location (i.e. not C:\, C:\Program Files\, etc) - install to something like D:\Games\Rally2000\.
If while choosing the installation path backslashes [ \ ] show up as hashes [ # ], use forward slashes [ / ] instead. After installation, run the game without any compatibility modes or admin privileges (or instead of starting the game you might get another prompt to install the game).
Can't set up wheel
Go to options - 'player details' - 'player 1 details' - 'setup controller'. Select your controller and set the axis mode to '3 axis wheel+pedals'. Enter 'program controller' and re-assign your pedal axes. They should show up as accelerator (-z) and brake (-rz).
If you end up getting 'Button 137' when assigning controls, reinstall the game, download the Rally Championship 2000 Patch 6 and retry configuring. Alternately, download the game from a different source: search for 'Rally 2000' on your favorite torrent search engine and pick the 'PC FR' one.
Sound bugs out after a while of playing
Problem with multi-core CPUs. One-time solution is to start the Windows Task Manager and set RAL.EXE's process affinity to only one core every time after you start the game. A more permanent solution is to download the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit and install the SingleProcAffinity shim for RAL.EXE.
Miniclip physics
That's how the game plays. If you want to try making the handling less (or more) sticky, or increase the damage multiplier, see the PHYSICS.TXT file in your game folder. If you don't have the file there, the game is probably not patched for physics editing, in which case download the Rally Championship 2000 Patch 6
External Links
Rally 2000 on Wikipedia
