Month: July 2016

2016 cars for NASCAR Racing 1999 Edition

A couple of months ago, I explained how to get NASCAR Racing 1999 Edition running on Windows 10 using DOSBox. That’s all well and good, but the cars included with the game are—much like the game itself—relics of the past.

Since NASCAR Racing 1999 Edition has an in-game paint scheme editor, however, there’s nothing to stop us from creating our own updated cars. That’s exactly what I’ve done, and you can now download my set of all 39 full-time 2016 Sprint Cup Series cars. The paint schemes are not perfect by any means, but they’re good enough for my purposes, and I hope you’ll enjoy using them.

To bring your game up to speed, simply unzip the .car files to your game’s cars directory; assuming you followed the instructions in my previous post, you can find that directory at %userprofile%\Documents\DOSGames\NR1999\cars. The files should be compatible with both NASCAR Racing 1999 Edition and NASCAR Racing 2. Start the game and make your way to the “Driver Info” section to create a fresh entry list.

I’ve adjusted each car’s skill numbers to approximately reflect real life. For example, Kevin Harvick and Brad Keselowski should run near the front of the pack each race, while Michael Annett and Jeffrey Earnhardt will be closer to the tail end of the field.

Possible resolution for email bouncing with 554 5.7.1 null error

Last month, a staff member at work reported getting an email delivery status notification error when attempting to send to an AOL email address:

<XXXXXXXXXX@aol.com>: host core-aba03c.mail.aol.com[172.27.22.39] said: 554 5.7.1 null (in reply to end of DATA command)

The SMTP reply code indicated the receiving server rejected the sender’s email, but the “null” message didn’t provide any additional insight, and a search for 554 5.7.1 null turned up no solid leads. The staffer had corresponded previously with the intended recipient, so why, then, was her email rejected?

It turned out that the user attached an email thread—i.e., an Outlook item file—to her outbound message. (In Microsoft Outlook 2016, you can do this from the Message ribbon by choosing Attach Item > Outlook Item.) I asked her to save the email thread as a PDF file and send that instead, and when she did so, her message was delivered without any problems.

Interestingly enough, a user on the Gmail Help Forum later that same day—after our staff member successfully sent the email—reported getting similar errors when attempting to send email to AOL addresses. This may be noteworthy because we do use Gmail accounts via Google Apps. I suppose it’s possible that there was actually a problem with AOL’s server that was resolved between the time our staffer sent the email with the Outlook item file attached and the time she re-sent her email with a PDF attachment; even if that was the case, however, adding email attachments in unusual file formats is a good way to get your outgoing mail rejected, and it’s a good thing to check if you have to troubleshoot a bounced email.