Grand Prix 4 on Windows 10

In case this is helpful for someone else still stuck in a similar situation that I was in a year ago:

Just over one year ago I wanted to turn my back on GP4 and totally give up playing this beautiful & timeless F1 simulator, but and I have found new hope for GP4 , as I can start to see some progress regarding overcoming CTD issues - I finally discovered that AVG Anti-virus has been the BIGGEST part of my CTD problems all long, and that disabling Anti-virus to play GP4 is ABSOLUTELY NOT a solution! The reason being, ever since I switched to Avast Anti-virus, GP4 CTDs hardly ever happens anymore, or at least it happens much much less now

(once-in-a-while the game still crashes while loading, during the Calibrate Audio / Calibrate Graphics phase, but at least now I can pretty much expect to get through an entire race distance at almost every attempt - which had become nearly impossible to do under AVG Anti-virus without guarantee of constant CTDs, even when you temporarily disable AVG just to play GP4).

So my recommendation, if you happen to be using AVG Anti-virus [or any other virus software] and you are having constant & frustrating GP4 CTDs, get rid of AVG!!! It is NOT ENOUGH to just disable it whenever you wish to play GP4 - to me it still seemed somehow to be able to affect the stability of GP4, All. The. time. ! (I suspect it may have been invading or stealing GP4 memory space? dunno ).

So, Just uninstall AVG completely (which was actually a painful process in itself, but that's a whole 'nother chapter for another day!) and then go with a totally different Anti-virus program... e.g. Avast seems to be adequately OK, and much much more friendly towards GP4.

BTW I gave up on windows 10 too - it felt too much like Microshaft spy software to me - and I reverted my machine back to factory-installed Windows 8.1.
Intel quadcore, 64bit, 2.41 GHz
8GB RAM,
450GB HardDisk
Intel-HD graphics, 2GB RAM

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"You will never find time for anything. If you want time you must make it." ~ Charles Buxton

Security Suites usually have what is called a 'Real-time file protection' which means it runs whenever you open or use a file. If this file is modified the suite may think it is a malware, but anyway this scanning slows everything down and may interfer with your game.
This is because games load a lot of textures, temporary files etc. and they are all scanned live if you don't instruct otherwise.
The solution is: instruct your security suite to only scan .exe, .bat or .com files when you play a game online, or shut it down completly when playing offline.

Then, a common issue with older games is: they don't keep pace with today's fast machines and may be out of synch when rendering the sound while the framerate doesn't keep up. For this reason put the FPS to 30 and not more in the options.

Hope this helps you,
XenonS



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/12/2016 11:26PM by XenonS.

I followed the instruction but it still won't paly. Here is the log file I get:

Starting log
GPxPatch version: 4.52
GPx version detected: encrypted GP4 v1.00
Date/time: 27-03-2020 16:00
Verbosity level is 0
OS version info: Windows 10 build 18362
Total physical memory: 32700 MB (free: 28653 MB)
Executing gp4.exe
*** error terminating process: (5) Accès refusé.

Do you use GP4 v1.02? Then you need the encrypted gp4.exe v1.02 as well.
Have a look at gp4central, there is fully installed version which you can just extract an play. no further settings needed. tried it on several computers and never had any issues.