First post, by Rekrul
I have a 1.8Ghz system running Windows 98SE and I can't get NFS:SE to work properly. Here's the part that really frustrates me; I had it working perfectly in the past, but now I can't remember how! I deleted it when I needed to make some room on my HD. Now I can't get it working properly again.
If I try to run either INFSW.EXE or INSTALLW.EXE, it asks about installing DirectX, I tell it not to, the screen goes black and it crashes. It generates an Application Error telling me that it tried to access memory at $xxxxxxx. I ran the little program that's supposed to allocate 512MB of RAM; They still crash. I set my virtual memory to 512MB, as recommended by some guides; They still crash.
So I ran the DOS installer. I select Soundblaster or SB Pro and the sound works perfectly. The video test is scrambled, but that's par for the course with DOS programs and Nvidia cards. I select to do a full install and the game installs.
As soon as I double-click NFS.EXE it crashes with a long list of error messages in the DOS window. By trial and error, I discovered that it was NFS.CFG that was crashing the program. I tried editing it to include just "SB", but it still crashed. Then I thought maybe it was the sound that was crashing it, so I took out the "SB", but left in "VIDEO ENG NOREMOTE" (maybe not exact, I'm typing this from memory) and it still crashed. Delete the CFG file and the game runs fine, but has no sound.
I thought maybe I could just copy over the rest of the files from the disk and run the Windows EXE. Nope! I tried every trick (allocating memory, restricting virtual memory), but the Windows EXE crashes with the same error as the installer.
Then I tried DOSBox 0.72. I mounted the NFS:SE directory as C, typed NFS and it crashed with the same errors as when I just double-click it. So I deleted the CFG file and tried again. Nothing happens. Literally nothing, after a few seconds, the DOS prompt re-appears.
I even tried it from real DOS mode, with the same results.
I know people have a hard time trying to get it to work under XP, but I'm using Windows 98SE. I've checked every help file I can find looking for any tricks I might have used, but found nothing. I installed it once before, so why I can't I get it working now? I could be mistaken, but I don't recall having this many problems the last time.