Grand Prix Legends

Grand Prix Legends is a 1998 racing video game by Papyrus Design Group based on the 1967 F1 season.

It featured a field of real-world drivers, cars and tracks from that year, with few replacements and adjustments due to licensing such as the Cooper being named “Coventry” and the Honda named “Murasama”. Rouen also took the place of the Le Mans Bugatti circuit on the 1967 schedule.

This engine was developed by Papyrus with multiple NASCAR-based video games and eventually became iRacing.

Murasama

Putting aside my personal affection for the Honda, I do still say it’s very fast – but only for the experienced. The Honda requires absolute precision and (usually) the use of a difficult to handle car setup.

It’s steering is sharp and it’s brakes function well considering the substantial weight of the car. The engine is the most powerful of all seven, but also slows the car greatly because of it’s extreme weight.

The Honda threatens the Brabham on fast tracks like Le Mans and Spa, but fails a lot at tracks like Zandvoort or Monaco where speed is not important and handling is.

The Honda simply is not a good car for a beginner, mainly because it will push your liking from Grand Prix Legends, it’s not easy to throw this car around, feel ok about a lap, then find out just how much slower you are than a slow and easy lap in the Brabham. With a bit of experience the Honda can be an incredible car, it’s easily thrown where you want it, then caught with quick steering adjustments – not for rookies.

Coventry

With lovely responsive handling, the Cooper is the car of choice for fast drivers who like to mix it with the crowd – and still win. The engine is poor, but the handling is superb and greatly enjoyable to drive against faster cars who’re slower in the turns.

It’s handling and ease of control more than makes up for the lack in engine power, it’s brakes are good and it’s enjoyable whether you’re a rookie or a pro. It’s a good choice for a beginner to learn Grand Prix Legends with this – it’s easy to catch and recover, but it’s not possible to be race competitive with it right away, that takes time.

Running on Windows 10

There are plenty of guides out there to get you through installing GPL as it’s best, but the very basics are: Install (if the setup freezes check the wait chain), update to v1.2, install the CPU patch and unless you want to use software rendering, install the D3D Patch.

If you want to run with Rendition graphics you will need a Rendition video card and either an old Windows 95 or 98 PC with the card properly setup – or – you can use the card in a modern machine using Windows 10 Pro’s Hyper-V as long as you can get the Windows 10 host to recognize it as a video card (able to output video using the Microsoft Basic Display Driver). You will obviously need to install a Windows 95 or 98 OS onto the VM client and then use PCI passthrough for the GPU, installing the drivers for the actual video card onto the VM. GPL recognizes both v1 and v2 Rendition cards without patching.

Rendition rendering allows higher resolutions, sharper textures, better aliasing and better visuals for smoke and skid marks. Though there are really no advantages over Direct3D.