  We study the prepotential of N=2 gauge theories using the instanton counting
techniques introduced by Nekrasov. For the SO theories without matter we find a
closed expression for the full prepotential and its string theory gravitational
corrections. For the more subtle case of Sp theories without matter we discuss
general features and compute the prepotential up to instanton number three. We
also briefly discuss SU theories with matter in the symmetric and antisymmetric
representations. We check all our results against the predictions of the
corresponding Seiberg-Witten geometries.
