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The Need For Speed SE on Win98SE?

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First post, by God Of Gaming

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Hello, my specs are:

Asus CUSL2-C motherboard, i815EP chipset
Pentium 3 1000mhz coppermine
320 MB PC133 SDRam (128+128+64)
3Dfx Voodoo3 2000 AGP with official 1.07 driver
Turtle Beach Montego 2 (Aureal Vortex2) with 2.041 driver
WD Caviar SE 120GB IDE HDD
some LG CD drive, dunno the model, connected with the sound card with a cable for redbook audio
Windows 98SE with the unofficial 3.56 service pack, DirectX 7.0a installed

So here's my problem, I want to get TNFS SE working perfectly on this machine if possible but I can't, I struggled quite a bit last night. To be particular, I want to get its Win95 version working, not its DOS version. At first I was not able to even start the installation as I was getting errors. Found in other posts in this forum that I have to disable DirectDraw accel in DxDiag, did so and it worked, I was finally able to install and run the game. But during the installation, on the sound card tab, Auto Detect worked and said it detected my sound card, the options to choose one manually were grayed out btw so I couldnt just pick the Windows Audio option. Test Sound didnt output any sound even though the install said it detected the sound card, and indeed when I ran the game there was no sound at all from it either. Why? How do I get sound to work?

The other thing is, videos don't work either, during the install if I leave them on Enabled, during the test I just get a black screen that stays until I restart the PC, so I had to disable them to install the game. Tests are forced btw, you cant skip them. Do I need to instal video codecs or something?

Finally I noticed that the game runs really smooth. Much smoother than its DOS version did under DOSBox on my main PC. It feels like going from 30fps to 60fps or something. It looks a bit nicer visually too, probably the voodoo3 22bit box filter at play. I also heard that the Win95 version supports Immersion I-Force FFB, and my wheel (Logitech Wingman Formula Force) does too, would be really sweet to play it with FFB. I thought NFS 2 was the first in the series with FFB support, guess I was wrong.

1999 Dream PC project | DirectX 8 PC project | 2003 Dream PC project

Reply 1 of 24, by Scali

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God Of Gaming wrote:

But during the installation, on the sound card tab, Auto Detect worked and said it detected my sound card, the options to choose one manually were grayed out btw so I couldnt just pick the Windows Audio option. Test Sound didnt output any sound even though the install said it detected the sound card, and indeed when I ran the game there was no sound at all from it either. Why? How do I get sound to work?

Selecting a sound card is only relevant for DOS.
In Windows, the sound goes via DirectSound, so it just uses whatever sound card is configured in Windows. It's hardware abstraction.
If you don't hear any sound, then likely your sound card configuration in Windows is not entirely correct.

God Of Gaming wrote:

The other thing is, videos don't work either, during the install if I leave them on Enabled, during the test I just get a black screen that stays until I restart the PC, so I had to disable them to install the game. Tests are forced btw, you cant skip them. Do I need to instal video codecs or something?

As far as I recall, EA used their own custom codec for videos back then, and the videos not working is probably a result of some bug between their code and your video driver.

God Of Gaming wrote:

Finally I noticed that the game runs really smooth. Much smoother than its DOS version did under DOSBox on my main PC.

Which isn't very surprising, given that DOSBox emulates the entire hardware, including the CPU, where the Windows version runs natively on the hardware.
This game ran fine on a decent Pentium back in the day (P75/P90 with a good videocard would probably be enough to play it at good framerates in 640x480). So your system is complete overkill (and way too new, which might explain all the driver issues).

All in all you're probably better off just booting your system in DOS (press F5 on bootup of Win9x), and running the game like that. It saves you the trouble of dealing with Windows drivers and bugs. It's a very early DirectX game, and it's not very forgiving.
The game itself is exactly the same, regardless of whether you play it in DOS or Windows. In Windows it just uses DirectX to abstract the video and audio devices (and joystick/steering wheel if you have it).
I believe it was the first game I ever played with Force Feedback, but I used a Microsoft Sidewinder steering wheel at the time (the regular 15-pin version, not the USB one).

http://scalibq.wordpress.com/just-keeping-it- … ro-programming/

Reply 2 of 24, by God Of Gaming

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Scali wrote:

If you don't hear any sound, then likely your sound card configuration in Windows is not entirely correct.

I recently built this machine, I only tested 2 games so far, Half-Life (which sounded spectacular with A3D) and an early alpha version of Serious Sam. Both games worked fine with no issues, and sound worked fine in them. What should I check?

Scali wrote:

As far as I recall, EA used their own custom codec for videos back then, and the videos not working is probably a result of some bug between their code and your video driver.

It would be a shame if the vids are not working, not anything gamebreaking but they're cool

Scali wrote:

All in all you're probably better off just booting your system in DOS (press F5 on bootup of Win9x), and running the game like that. It saves you the trouble of dealing with Windows drivers and bugs. It's a very early DirectX game, and it's not very forgiving.
The game itself is exactly the same, regardless of whether you play it in DOS or Windows. In Windows it just uses DirectX to abstract the video and audio devices (and joystick/steering wheel if you have it).
I believe it was the first game I ever played with Force Feedback, but I used a Microsoft Sidewinder steering wheel at the time (the regular 15-pin version, not the USB one).

Would the wheel and ffb work fine on DOS though? I only found windows driver for it (Logitech Gaming Software 4.60). I havent actually tested if it works yet, as I only bought this wheel this week, and I still don't have a power brick for it, the seller had lost the original...

1999 Dream PC project | DirectX 8 PC project | 2003 Dream PC project

Reply 3 of 24, by Scali

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God Of Gaming wrote:

I recently built this machine, I only tested 2 games so far, Half-Life (which sounded spectacular with A3D) and an early alpha version of Serious Sam. Both games worked fine with no issues, and sound worked fine in them. What should I check?

I don't know, could be anything.
Might not be solvable.

God Of Gaming wrote:

It would be a shame if the vids are not working, not anything gamebreaking but they're cool

Again, might not be a way to solve it. The videos may use a certain resolution and/or pixel format that your particular card/driver doesn't support.

God Of Gaming wrote:

Would the wheel and ffb work fine on DOS though?

I don't know.
If the FFB protocol is standardized, or the game has specific support for the FFB protocol used by Logitech, then it might.
I don't recall if the Microsoft wheel I used had FFB in DOS or only in Windows.

http://scalibq.wordpress.com/just-keeping-it- … ro-programming/

Reply 4 of 24, by God Of Gaming

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I remember that the vids were not working quite right in DOSBox either until I edited the config to set machine to svga_et4000 and added UNIVBE.exe at the bottom of the config to start before nfs.exe

1999 Dream PC project | DirectX 8 PC project | 2003 Dream PC project

Reply 5 of 24, by Jo22

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Right, there was a post about that on OS/2 Museum, too.
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/need-for-speed-se-video-glitch/

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Reply 6 of 24, by God Of Gaming

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Except that now on the Win98SE PC Im not getting garbled videos, in fact Im not getting anything at all, just black screen. Hm, I wonder if my monitor even supports 320x200 video mode to begin with? I should test that when I get home from work tonight. It's an IBM P275, a Sony CPD-G520 clone. In Windows it lets me select anything between 640x480 and 1920x1440

1999 Dream PC project | DirectX 8 PC project | 2003 Dream PC project

Reply 7 of 24, by Scali

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The 320x200 mode in VGA is actually 640x400 to the monitor (70 Hz), and is very standard.
The monitor won't be the problem. Display driver/monitor driver in Windows might. You may have to add custom resolutions for that.
But again, unlikely, since the hardware is too old for that (at around the Vista era, hardware stopped supporting things like 8-bit modes and 320x200 out-of-the-box, but usually adding custom modes can fix that).

Edit: What I would personally find interesting would be to find and fix whatever bugs there are in NFS SE that prevents it from running on an NT-based version of Windows (and therefore any current version of Windows).

http://scalibq.wordpress.com/just-keeping-it- … ro-programming/

Reply 8 of 24, by God Of Gaming

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A Source Port could be sweet indeed, with support for modern resolutions and stuff. I'm personally thinking of trying to remake all the early NFS games in rFactor, or, well, at least the cars and tracks that is.

1999 Dream PC project | DirectX 8 PC project | 2003 Dream PC project

Reply 9 of 24, by collector

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For using old hardware ask in Marvin. This forum is for *modern* hardware. Marvin, the Paranoid Android

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Reply 11 of 24, by God Of Gaming

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Sorry, I saw the caption "Getting old Windows games working. " and thought it was the right place, will keep this in mind for the future. BTW Im pretty tired today so i'll deal with NFS tomorrow.

1999 Dream PC project | DirectX 8 PC project | 2003 Dream PC project

Reply 12 of 24, by Stiletto

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God Of Gaming wrote:

Sorry, I saw the caption "Getting old Windows games working. " and thought it was the right place, will keep this in mind for the future. BTW Im pretty tired today so i'll deal with NFS tomorrow.

Sorry, the forum description predates Marvin and the influx of retro hardware collectors.

Remember that the website name is actually an acronym/"backronym": V.O.G.O.N.S. - Very Old Games On New Systems. It was created in the days of ntcompatible.com and win2kgames.com, testing the limits of what was possible to make games run natively on the newer OS's (NT4 / Windows 2000 / Windows XP). Going from DOS/Win9x to WinNT was a *huge* change, with a brand new (to most gamers) OS kernel, and backwards compatibility was not assumed. Gamers needed places to come together to trade tips and tricks and patches to keep the old classics going. That knowledge powers the Steam and GOG classics packs of today.

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Stiletto

Reply 13 of 24, by God Of Gaming

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Would be great if some day we reach a point where all games ever made would work perfectly on a modern PC, with all features intact.... I'm sure a Win 98SE emulator that emulates period correct hardware like how DOSBox does would help a lot, as WinXP games and newer (2001+) work fine on a modern PC with just a few exceptions, but there's a lot of win9x era games that don't.

p.s. so I just tested setting NFS to run in 320x200 instead of 640x480. It works fine in 320x200, looks really pixelated but it does show up on the screen. So thats not the reason why the videos don't work then.

1999 Dream PC project | DirectX 8 PC project | 2003 Dream PC project

Reply 14 of 24, by Stiletto

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God Of Gaming wrote:

I'm sure a Win 98SE emulator that emulates period correct hardware like how DOSBox does would help a lot

At the moment, PCem aims to tackle this (and more).

MAME (the part that was formerly MESS) will assuredly follow it up.

Qemu and Bochs may also have it on their radar somewhere far down the to-do list, but gaming isn't their main focus.

"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen

Stiletto

Reply 15 of 24, by God Of Gaming

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so I installed NFS SE in a virtual machine, and both sound and video worked fine there 😁 So it's not Win98SE's fault I'm having issues, it's something else... Guess I'll try to make a fresh win98se install on a spare HDD I have and see if it works then

1999 Dream PC project | DirectX 8 PC project | 2003 Dream PC project

Reply 16 of 24, by God Of Gaming

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progress report: I made a fresh win98se install on a spare 40gb maxtor I had, this time around the videos work, so I guess the reason they dont work on my main hdd is that theres something wrong with it, a reinstall should fix it. There's still no sound though. Perhaps NFS is just not compatible with Aureal Vortex 2? Has anyone else here with Aureal Vortex 2 tried NFS SE?

1999 Dream PC project | DirectX 8 PC project | 2003 Dream PC project

Reply 17 of 24, by zerker

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Not with a Vortex 2, but your post did inspire me to at least test the Windows build of NFS SE on my Win 98 SE machine. As your second install indicated, I had no problem with videos. When I was running the installer, all the sound choices were grayed out for me too; I just hit the detect button and all it told me was that it was 'detected'. I'm using a SB AWE 64 Value, for reference.

Reply 18 of 24, by God Of Gaming

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I just tested with aureal vortex 1 (au8820) I had lying around, and, sound works. So the problem is with the vortex 2 (au8830) card then. Might be the driver? Im using 4.06.2041 which from my research is the best driver to use with those cards. Used 4.06.1189 for the vortex 1. BTW Im thinking of getting an Audigy 2 as well for this machine, I hope NFS sound would work fine on that.

1999 Dream PC project | DirectX 8 PC project | 2003 Dream PC project

Reply 19 of 24, by Falcosoft

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You can try to decrease (or turn off completely) the directsound hardware acceleration level of your Aureal 2. I'm almost sure it can work at least in OFF state.
http://www.soundcardpacket.org/AGWImages/3multprop98.gif

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