by terrell on Tue Mar 27, 2007 3:09 pm
course.dat is the database maintained by links telling the game which courses you have installed. if you put all your courses here:
<d>:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Links 2003\Courses
the next time you start links and goto the course selector, all your courses in that folder will show up automatically. however, if you've created an alternative folder, e.g. courses2k3 or apcd_courses, you'll have to re-add those courses via course manager.
the most common mistake, is when peeps download a new course that's in a self-extracting archive, they click the exe, zip, 7z, etc, and the course is placed in a folder under courses. the course manager doesn't pick those up automatically, so you have to add them manually.
edit: i can count on one hand the number of times deleting the course.dat actually solved a course not found problem. the vast majority of the problems have come from self-extracting archives putting the crz into a folder other than courses (or warren messing up).