Classic Games Emulated: The Need for Speed III for Windows

May 28, 2021

Refinements Continue To Make a Great Racing Franchise Even Better!

The next game in the series, Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit, was released on August 1998 for Windows. This game saw improvements and enhancements in the graphics department, taking advantage of the newest 3D accelerators that were hitting the market at that time. As the price of PC's continued to fall, these technologies were becoming much more accessible. The emergence of 3D acceleration allowed PC's to remain at the forefront of gaming.

The game itself add extra new features. The most noticeable was the inclusion of the hot pursuit mode. In this mode, your racing in a sports car against police AI on the track. The PC version also included a role reversal where you can race as the police. NFS:III also included extra tracks with diverse scenery, set mostly in locations scattered across North America. Car tuning was introduced, allowing for the adjustment of gear ratios and engine tuning. Many of the car attributes could be adjusted as well, like break balance, suspension, and tires. Network multiplayer was added as well, using the TCP/IP protocol on Windows for the support. Multiple players could race themselves at one using different computers, and not sharing the same screen at once. Something that's taken for granted today was a amazing feature back in the late 90's. We've come a long way. Like its predecessors, this game mostly featured sports cars. Their were graphical enhancements as well, with many critics praising the game for it's amazing detail in the graphical department. Like it's predecessor, the game retained its arcade-style racing. The racing style was very similar as well, with refinements here and their that improved the racing mechanics. A great installment that's worth playing. I had a lot of fun playing this game back in the day on PC.

NFS:III Hot Pursuit was installed on my same virtual machine as NFS:II was on. The PCEM emulator had the emulated the 3DFX Voodoo Accelerator installed . Also used was the Award 430VX motherboard with a Pentium Processor operating at 200MHz. Installed components includes the Creative Labs SoundBlaster 16 audio adapter, S3 864 SVGA card, and 32MB's of RAM. I was running Windows 95 OSR2. Like the previous game, NFS:III was running at near full speed given the specs of the emulated hardware. The in-game menus performed more slowly though, operating at around 70 percent in relation to the emulated hardware.

One thing has to be brought up though. I don't use the FPS (Frames per second) measurement when running games under PCEM. The reason why is because PCEM is a full-fledged emulator emulating the sound, video, the CPU, and the GPU all at the same time. It's emulating and translating all the instructions of all those components all at once, unlike a virtualizer which uses the hardware on your computer natively, without instruction translation. As such, virtualizers like VirtualBox and VMware wouldn't incur the same performance hit as running under an emulated environment because it's using the hardware natively. FPS wouldn't be a good measurement because it would measure the frames of the game engine in relation to the hardware its running on. Since the hardware is emulated, it wouldn't be all that accurate. The measurement of the system performance as a percent between the emulated hardware to the real hardware is my preferred method of measuring game performance. I would use the FPS measurement if I was running the games natively though, or if I was using a virtualizer instead. I'm using the same PCEM executable that I've ran NFS:II on for performance reasons. It's also a modified binary compiled from source using the PCEM Version 12 source code included. I've stuck with that particular version because I knew how to compile that code from the source. This version had the modified memory code that imitates cache, which sped up the emulation. I don't know how to compile the later versions from source, as they use different build environments. Also, I wouldn't know the performance differences of compiled versions of PCEM between the Intel and AMD processors. From the PCEM forums, the general consensus is that Intel users general experience better emulated performance than AMD users though. With that said, the performance is still very solid on my platform. My computer has a AMD-FX Quad-Core CPU running at 3.8 GHz. Like last time, I'll have to make the assumption though that about 99% of those reading this probably don't compile code from source, which can be intimidating. With that said, NFS:III isn't the fastest, but it's still very playable and is a fun game. It runs very well within PCEM as well.