First post, by RoyBatty
- Rank
- Oldbie
Well, I learned some cool stuff on this forum over time. So I thought I would start to give back some of the things that I have done. 😁
Here I am posting a little guide on making Need For Speed II SE work properly on XPSP3 (32bit) with a multi-core processor and modern graphics card, with glide. Also some tips on getting it to look as good as it possibly can.
First thing to do is install the game. It won't find any 3dfx compatible hardware, so it will just install the software renderer version. Don't worry about this.
Then you need to install the patch, which will install some updates for TCP/IP play and some language files, in addition to both an updated software renderer version and a 3dfx version of the main game.
Finding the patch can take some hours of google searching, but I finally found it here. (I hope it's ok to post the link)
http://www.giffer.com/public/dos/pgam3/Files/NFS2SE_U.ZIP
unzip the files to the installation directory of the game and double click PATCH.BAT.
You also need the Application Compatibility Toolkit (I am using v5.5) which you can find on the microsoft download site. Install it (requires .net framework 2.0).
From the program menu, choose Compatibility Administrator.
under Custom Databases there should be a New Database entry, right click it and choose Create New > Application Fix.
Under Name of the program to be fixed: type Need For Speed II SE (or whatever you like)
Under Name of the vendor for this program: type Electronic Arts
Hit the browse button and navigate to the installation directory for the game, and select nfs2sea.exe.
click next, under operating system Modes choose none, and click next.
You need to check the following boxes:
EmulateCDFS
EmulateGetDiskFreeSpace
GlobalMemoryStatusLie
IgnoreException
MapMemoryB0000
SingleProcAffinity
Click next, and click finish. Click Save, and give the database a name (Need For Speed II SE), and a filename (nfs2seXP) and click save.
Then click on the file menu, and choose install. This will solve all the errors with running the exe.
Now for Glide...
I chose the dgVoodoo glide wrapper as it works very well with this game. I used 1.50beta2 (google is your friend here). unzip it and copy dgVoodooSetup.exe and glide2x.dll to the games installation directory.
Double Click dgVoodooSetup.exe , click search, and choose the glide2x.dll. For the settings under the Global tab, Rederer API: Direct3D9, Display Device: (your card), Display Driver: Automatically Selected, Screen Mode: Full Screen, Screen bit depth: 32 bit. For the settings under the Glide tab, D3D textures bit depth 32 bit. Refresh Rate: uncheck both boxes, Texturing options: check Force Trilinear mipmapping, check Force Bilinear filtering, check Texmem scaled to 4MB, LFB access: Enable LFB access, check Use Hardware cache buffers when poss., check Use fastwrite for unmatching formats, check Closer to real hardware, Colorkeying method: Automatic, Texture mem size: 65536 kB, Resolution: 1600x1200 (or whatever you like), leave the Gamma Correction slider alone, Monitor Freq: 60Hz (or whatever your monitor is set to, this is important!), Miscellaneous: check Force triple buffering, check Use hardware vertex buffers, check Enable Glide-gammaramp. When your done press OK.
You may have to adjust these somewhat for your videocard, I have an nvidia 9800GX2 and this is what worked best for me after hours of tinkering and trying not to get any errors and also achieve the best graphics.
Since I have an nvidia card, I also used nhancer (v2.51) to create a profile for the game to enhance it further.
Create a new profile, and call it Need for Speed: II SE (or what you like)
under executables, press the file icon on the right side and navigate to nfs2sea.exe.
In the right hand pane there is a lot of options, I set mine as follows (you can change them depending on how powerful your card is).
Enhancements tab:
Antialiasing, Multisampling, 16x
Anisotropic Filtering 16x
Compatibility tab:
check Antialiasing compatability, and select 00000000 general compatibility
SLI Mode: (If you have SLI as I do)
in the drop down list, choose Alternate Frame Rendering
In the Tools menu, select write all profiles to registry.
Your done. You can now enjoy Need for Speed II SE in it's maximum quality (makes psx version look so bad!) and also play it on XPSP3 without any error or crashes.
I'll write some more of these guides as I do them.
Cheers!