is DEP enabled? A long time ago I had to disable DEP both in Windows and in the BIOS otherwise a couple of my games wouldn't load.

Also try Windbg on the game and see if that helps to trace it further.

I wasn't even able to get NFSSE working properly on Win7. I ended up running it on VPC with Win98.

Are there any good reasons to go through the trouble of getting the Windows version working? Higher resolution or framerate?

I think the sound is possibly slightly better, and you can use Windows steering wheels slightly easier.

But not really many more reasons!

VirtuaIceMan wrote on 2015-01-02, 01:06:

I wrote a guide to get NFSSE working on WinXP a while ago (How to get Need For Speed Special Edition working perfectly in Window […]
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I wrote a guide to get NFSSE working on WinXP a while ago (How to get Need For Speed Special Edition working perfectly in Windows XP) but this doesn't help at all with my current new PC! I'm talking about the Windows version of the game (that uses DirectX2!), as opposed to the DOS version, which can be made to work in DOSBox fine (even the Showcase videos) by following the guide here http://www.nfscars.net/forum/showthread.php?t=24219 (note the line on the final few posts: "univbe -d1 -m16384" to run UNIVBE, or it won't work!).

Anyway, to install the game, I put it on a virtual machine (as ACT6.1 won't allow shims against CD-ROM files, boo!), then copied over the install folder, as the game doesn't seem to call the registry (no registry settings I could find in the regular places anyway). However, when I run the game (using the WinXP guide above, which is essentially a cut-back Win98 compatibility mode that improved the framerate on XP) it just always crashes. I even tried WinXP compatibility mode + the fixes mentioned in my WinXP fixes list, but still the same crashes.

Oh, I should add that the game requires DPLAY.EXE to exist, so either copy it in from the CD-ROM's REDIST/DIRECTX sub-folder, or make a duplicate of dplayx.dll in the Windows/SysWOW64 folder and name it dplay.dll

Anyway, the crash in question is always this (from Windows Event Viewer):

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1Faulting application name: nfs.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x31c8225c
2Faulting module name: nfs.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x31c8225c
3Exception code: 0xc0000005
4Fault offset: 0x0007d0d5
5Faulting process ID: 0xc50
6Faulting application start time: 0x01d02625f3166f81
7Faulting application path: C:\games\nfs1\nfs.exe
8Faulting module path: C:\games\nfs1\nfs.exe
9Report ID: 325d0fa7-9219-11e4-82c5-7824af8a9e0a
10Faulting package full name: 
11Faulting package-relative application ID: 

Or a variation thereof (the Faulting process ID, start time, and Report ID all vary, of course).

So, should this be chalked up as: too old, use the DOS version instead, or does anyone fancy looking more into it?

FYI old games Road Rash and Destruction Derby 2 from the same era are possible to play on Win8.1 64bit, so it's not just the age of the game, maybe the game doesn't like 16GB RAM or graphics card, or something else (FYI I set virtual memory to 512KB under System/Advanced system settings/Advanced/Virtual memory; it didn't help either!

I made a guide few months back but it's not fully accurate, it works on 2 out of 3 pcs
Re: The Need for Speed Special Edition for Windows doesn't work