What is NASCAR Racing 2003 Season?

NASCAR Racing 2003 Season - racing simulator ported by Aspyr, single or multiplayer (LAN preferred as the GameRanger service may no longer be available).

Download NASCAR Racing 2003 Season for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 10.1 up to Mac OS 10.5

Compatibility notes

Operating Systems:
    Macintosh OS X 10.1.5 or later

Minimum:

•     PowerPC G4 733 Single or 500 Dual CPU
•     256 MB of RAM
•     16 MB ATI Radeon class or nVidia geForce 2
•     8X CD-ROM drive

Recommended:

•     Macintosh OS X 10.2
•     PowerPC G4 867
•     512 MB or more of RAM
•     32 MB ATI Radeon 8500 or nVidia geForce 3
•     8X CD-ROM drive
•     Internet connection

Keyboard with additional F keys (F1-F16) preferred, F13 key used for screenshots - note added by Mac

Note: as of 2020, this game cannot run on an emulator because of its heavy reliance on OpenGL for 3D graphics.

INSTALLATION

Installation is accomplished by dragging the NASCAR 2003 Season folder to your hard drive.

STARTING THE GAME

1) Ensure the NASCAR Racing 2003 Season CD-ROM is in your CD-ROM drive.
2) Use the NASCAR Configuration program to select the desired Game Resolution, Texture Quality, and Input Device configuration.
3) Click Play NASCAR 2003 to run the game.

DISPLAY RESOLUTIONS

It is possible that the NASCAR configuration application may not display all the available resolutions for your video card & monitor setup. If this happens, you can make NASCAR run with a particular screen size by changing the values of windowWidth & windowHeight in the config.ini file that is located in the NASCAR folder. There are some widescreen sizes that the introduction movie will not play in.

ANTI-AILASING

In MacOS 10.2 or higher, anti-aliasing has been added to the OpenGL drivers. Turing this on can make a big difference in how the game looks, especially at lower resolutions. It can be turned on by changing the multiSampleSize value in the config.ini file that is located in the NASCAR folder. Acceptable numbers are 2, 4, 5, 8 & 9. The higher the number the better the graphics will look, but performance will be effected depending on your system & video card. 

ANISOTROPIC FILTERING

A problem with the way polygons are drawn is that as you look at the polygon at low angles the texture tends to get very blurry. You can see this particularly in a car racing game, as the armco, fences, road surface and grass are usually at very low angles. Anisotropic filtering is a neat trick that can help the texture look better at these low angles. If your video card and drivers support this feature, you will be able to enable Anisotropic Filtering by selecting "Extreme" from the Texture Filtering Quality drop-down of on the game's Graphics Options screen.

GRAPHICS PERFORMANCE

There are a lot of options that can be used to tune NASCAR 2003 to run at a reasonable frame rate. The frame rate counter is turned on by pressing the F key. Turning off the solar effects graphics option can give you a significant frame rate increase. Setting the Trackside Objects to some or minimal will also increase frame rates significantly on most tracks. Reducing the number of cars drawn will have an impact on the frame rate. But reducing the number of computer cars that are actually racing has an even bigger impact.

FORCE FEEDBACK INPUT CONTROLLERS

NASCAR supports force feedback on MacOS X 10.2 or higher with Apples Force Feedback drivers installed. If the game detects that an input device is force feedback capable the check box will become available for selection. NASCAR uses a constant force output model so devices like gamepads will not respond.

WHEEL/PEDAL CONTROLLERS

Some pedal sets respond as two separate axis, NASCAR tries to detect these and report them as such. This allows you to apply braking while still maintaining a throttle setting and corner at a faster speed.  When you calibrate your controller three different axis will be presented, one for the wheel & two for the pedals. Make sure you move them through the full range of motion for proper calibration.

Emulating this? It could probably run under: QEMU