Horse Racing Fantasy Community

Our game can be played offline and can also be played with your firewall turned on or blocking our game-to-server communication, but you will not be able to earn daily game points, participate in trainer, jockey or bettor tournaments, nor breed and manage your own virtual horse racing stable.

Ninety-eight percent of our players play with full game-to-server communication. We've been in business since 1988 and provide secure game-to-server communication. Therefore, to maximize your game play, you must designate through your firewall program full communication between your game and our server. There are different types of firewalls, each having their own unique control panel for allowing (or making exceptions for) particular programs like ours to function. The two main firewall programs are Microsoft that comes with your operating system or one provided by Norton (Symantec), which is usually part of their antivirus protection.

The following programs need to be marked as 'exceptions' in order for the game to operate correctly:

hrgcommn.dll
horseraceatl.exe

These two programs are responsible for communicating your game scores, transferring your horse data, your trainer game races, your breeding horses, your jockey and betting stats and other game communications required for full access, benefits and features including earning game community points, the currency in our game.

If you are not sure how to allow the two mentioned programs to communicate through your firewall, simply Google your firewall's name and "how to allow certain programs".

If you believe you have set up the exceptions through your firewall to run our two programs (hrgcommn.dll and horseraceatl.exe) and the game is still not communicating with the server, you might have to restart your computer after you've set the firewall exceptions.

Approximately 10% of firewall programs will continue to block our game-to-server communications even when you have granted permission to our two programs. This is a common flaw in several popular firewalls. To avoid this issue, simply turn your firewall off while playing our game and immediately turn it back on when you're finished playing.

How do you know if the game is communicating with the server?

Normally our main game screen will tell you that we cannot connect to the server, but in some instances one of our two programs is allowed to communicate and the other is blocked by your firewall - therefore, you may not receive that message. The best way to test if the firewall is blocking our program from communicating is to simply run several races in the game from the Quick Start mode, then access the community, click on the My Account tab, which will take you to your profile page. After each race, the race count number in your profile box should increase. If that count is not increasing, chances are your firewall is blocking one or both of the above-mentioned programs.

I've been told never to turn off my firewall for any program.

It is very important that you keep your firewall on at all times, and that's why we strongly suggest trying the exception route first. We've been in business for over ten years and have built a reputation of providing a quality game and never interfering with a person's computer or any information associated with it. Our communications programs only pass race game data to our server. Therefore, if you have to turn off your firewall during game play, rest assured that the only information that is being passed through our communication programs is that associated with your game. While playing the game with your firewall off, visit only our game community and sites you absolutely trust.

We also invite all players to participate in our community forums and ask our member base if they've ever had an issue with our game-to-server communications. Even a search of the Internet will reveal that in our ten-year history, there has never been any complaints by our game players pertaining to firewalls, privacy issues, etc.