Classic Games Emulated: Revisiting NFS High Stakes Modding

 

Modding On The Mind!

As anyone who's read my NFS:HS article or watching my uploads on YouTube, one can tell that they're two things that I'm a fan of: NFS:HS and Virtualization. I like contained environments that allow me to run beloved games from the past on far more powerful configurations. It only seemed natural for me to embark on the journey of getting NFS:HS running under VMware Player. I had a original copy of the game on CD-ROM which was installed on my guest setup. The guest configuration had two cores allocated to it, 2GB's of RAM, and 3D acceleration via my Nvidia GTX 950. The guest OS running was Windows 7 32-bit. After installing HS, I copied the patch, and started to burn rubber. After that, I duplicated the game folder so I could have two installations: one stock and another one for mod.

Within the NFS:HS folder, their are various directories. The "DATA/CARS" folder has both the racing and traffic cars. The first thing I remembered (since this was the first time revisiting HS modding in many years) is that I couldn't have more than 52 items in the "DATA/CARS" because the game will crash. However, one can either replace cars in preexisting folders, or delete some of the folders and have new folders entirely. As long as you don't surpass 52 items in the folder, then you're good to go.

Using the patch provides access to the video thrash drivers. Back in the day, the driver that one used was determined by the video card in your system. For example the DX6-8 drivers would be used for the ATI All-In-Wonder and early Radeons adapters, the Nvidia TNT/RIVA accelerator, and the S3 Virge. Glide would be used for the 3DFX Voodoo 1, 2, and Banshee 3D accelerator. Since I'm a sucker for nostalgia, I decided to use the Glide thrash driver. The Modern Patch uses the nGlide wrapper, which remaps the Glide driver calls to modern accelerators, allowing 3DFX Glide games to run on  modern systems using current GPU's without needing the  original 3DFX cards. nGlide runs great under VMware Player as well.

Once I got my choice cars downloaded from the Internet, I started to grind asphalt in no time. at this point and not being content, I realized that I can install map mods as well. I've fell in love with the map mods made by NFSFAN83 (SlawekR Elblag Poland). I've downloaded the maps and placed the files in their appropriate directory ("DATA/TRACKS") folder. I've started the game with the modded maps and HS kicked me back to the menu screen. What's going on here!? This isn't making sense!?

Eventually, I discovered the problem. The maps made by NFSFAN83 incorporated a lot of textures in them. Enough in fact that the nGlide wrapper couldn't process all the textures because their wasn't enough memory according to the driver , thus kicking me back to the main menu. The 3DFX Voodoo that nGlide is imitating originally came with 4MB's of dedicated RAM, while the Voodoo 2 came with 8/12MB's (depending on card). The Voodoo 2 had a 4MB framebuffer for textures. The nGlide wrapper conforms to the memory setup of the Voodoo GPU's. Their wasn't enough texture memory for nGlide to process all the textures that were used in NFSFAN83's maps. A different thrash driver had to be used.

Eventually, I found the DX9 thrash driver. This driver didn't have the memory limitation, and thus, could load all the textures. Since my virtual machine had 1GB of allocated GPU memory ( 1 out of 2GB's of video RAM that came with the  Nvidia GTX 950 installed in my system). Now, I could see these maps in action as I'm burning rubber in hot pursuit. The DX9 driver performed very well under VMware Player. The driver also supported modern HD resolutions. For the video record sessions though, I like to run the game at period screen resolutions. Even with the DX9 driver, I decided to stick to the screen resolution that the Voodoo 2 supported: 800 by 600, 16-bit color.

The maps made by NFSFAN83 are hosted at: https://www.nfsaddons.com











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