In this guide, I'll show you how to get Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit to run on Windows 98 with a more recent/unsupported graphics card and with access to hardware-accelerated graphics.

Introduction:

Need for speed III is a game that requires a card with support for Direct3D 5 graphics. Running the graphics setup utility that's found in the "3dSetup" folder of your game's directory will give you Software Rendering as the only graphics option available. That's probably because the game tries to identify what graphics card you're running and checks to see if it's in its list of supported card models but fails to do so. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the game to run in software mode either as it crashes my whole operating system. Hope that you find this guide to be helpful.

Requirements

- We're going to be running this game with 3DFX graphics so an installation of nGlide will be needed to translate its graphics calls to DirectX. This wrapper is compatible with Windows 98.
- In order to successfully run NFS III, you're going to need the 3DFX Voodoo3 Patch (nfs3_update). It will be included below as an attachment.

Installation

1. Download and install nGlide if you haven't already.
2. Download and extract the 3DFX Voodoo3 patch (nfs3_update) to a new folder.

In this extracted zip archive are a couple of updated game files.

3. Inside this folder, Run 3DDATA.EXE. No window will appear when you execute it because all it did was add new text entries to a file called 3ddata.dat.
4. We're gonna copy this modified 3ddata.dat file over to the 3dSetup folder of your game directory. If it asks to replace the file, confirm it.
5. Copy voodoo2a.dll over to the game's file directory and confirm file override.

6. The graphics card settings for Need for Speed III are stored in the registry. We're gonna be making some registry tweaks in order to be able to run the game in 3DFX mode.

Go to the following path in the registry:

1HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Electronic Arts\Need For Speed III

Change your registry key values to the ones shown below.

7. Launch Need for Speed III.

Conclusion

If everything is done correctly, you should see the 3DFX logo which indicates that the game is running with translated graphics. You are ready to play.
Thank you for reading my guide.