Fast and Furious Superbikes recovery on a Dell Optiplex

[Hydreigon]

Got an Optiplex 380 with a PNY Geforce 8400 GS installing Superbikes v3.04

Got a lot of concerns since initial recovery attempts only ended in failure. Attempting to install on a new SATA SSD (SP A55 128GB) that wasn't formatted yet resulted in an error stating it can't write to the disk. Fortunately, someone had a used SATA SSD (HP S650 240GB) that was formatted to some extent and the installer successfully but the computer doesn't boot the OS this uses (no "PLEASE WAIT" screen at all). Are these things picky with what SATA drives it can use and does a drive have to be formatted beforehand?

I'm ordering an HDD dock soon to better test these drives on my main computer.

 

[Hydreigon]

Oops. Someone please move this to the general repair and help thread. Been a while since I created a new thread.

 

[billyseven]

Personally I have worked on a couple of the CRT versions of Super Bikes (not flat panel) which to my recall all used the Dell Optiplex 740 and was a very common pc used in many arcade machines during the late 2000's. I can not speak to a newer versions of the game.

The install/recovery discs are setup to work with somewhat specific hardware (i.e. chip sets) common to particular mother boards and are pretty much "unattended" installs. In other words you should be able to put the disc in the drive, power up the pc, and the rest is all done without any additional input from you. So unlike a windows installation (and these are not windows based games) when you hit a "bump" in your setup, windows will often search/prompt you for a driver to install. However these discs will not do so and you'll likely end up with just a failed installation when using the wrong hardware.

You can give Beston Distributing a call as they are the Raw Thrills support line and they should be able to tell you what model would have been original to your machine.

For the record I am not saying that it is impossible to run other models of pc's or mess with install images, but if you would just like your game to work, you should be able to source the correct dell mother board (or entire pc) from ebay to match what is needed to work with your install discs.

Lastly I have run into issues trying to use relatively large "disk drives" (when compared to original) or similar when switching to SSD but unfortunately I have no memory as to which machines this was an issue with.

 

[billyseven]

Also and as you mentioned, Super Bikes uses a video card, so the same applies for installation discs having only the drivers for whatever card(s) were used in the games.