This page is for the original 1995 game. For the 2016 reboot, see Need for Speed (2016).
The Need for Speed[Note 1] is a singleplayer and multiplayer racing game co-developed by Pioneer Productions and EA Canada and published by Electronic Arts. It is the first game in the Need for Speed series.
The game was first released on 3DO in North America and Europe on December 2, 1994 and later ported to MS-DOS in September 1995. The game was later ported to and released for Windows in June 1996 as The Need for Speed: Special Edition, which added an additional car and two tracks.
Although the Special Edition has added support for Windows, the game has poor compatibility on NT-based Windows OS from Windows XP onward. It is recommended to run the MS-DOS version in DOSBox instead.
Availability
- For more contents, it is recommended to get the Special Edition which has improvement compared to the original version.
Version differences
- Special Edition added one new playable car and two tracks compared to the original edition, as well as mirrored version of each track and time of day setting.
Monetization
Type |
Notes |
One-time game purchase
| The game requires an upfront purchase to access. |
Sponsored
| The game was sponsored by Road & Track magazine and various licensed cars. |
Microtransactions
Essential improvements
Patches
- All patches are available from The Need For Speed SE Patches (Archived from original).
Video corruption in Special Edition
Videos in Need for Speed Special Edition (1996) may be corrupted, unless they run on a period correct video card.
The bug is explained, together with a way to fix it in the game code at the os2musem.
DOSBox-X
|
When using DOSBox-X, this bug can be prevented by disallowing low-res VESA modes with the following setting in your DOSBox-X config file in the [video] section:
allow low resolution vesa modes = false
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Use UniVBE
|
When using the original DOSBox, use the UniVBE.
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Game data
Configuration file(s) location
Save game data location
Video
Input
Audio
Audio feature |
State |
Notes |
Separate volume controls |
|
Race music, menu music, sound effects |
Surround sound |
|
8-bit mono, 8-bit stereo, 16-bit stereo |
Subtitles |
|
|
Closed captions |
|
|
Mute on focus lost |
|
For DOSBox change the priority background value in the DOSBox configuration file. |
Localizations
Language |
UI |
Audio |
Sub |
Notes |
English |
|
|
|
|
French |
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|
|
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Network
Multiplayer types
Connection types
Ports
- No port information; you can edit this page to add it.
- Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) support status is unknown.
Issues fixed
Running the game on Windows 7, 8.1 or 10
The game doesn't install with the setup program but can be installed manually. But the game never runs by opening the executable, you have to hook it through DxWnd to get it working. However, it has been found that the game doesn't even hook well with this program, it crashes before it gets hooked, it also doesn't run when it finds an unsupported driver on the machine (maybe delaying the hook), for example, a USB audio driver. If the driver gets uninstalled, the game mostly works fine. Still the game can have hooking problems and may not run in some instances.
Manually installing the game and running it using DxWnd[2][citation needed]
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- Copy 'FRONTEND', 'GAMEDATA', 'SIMDATA', 'IFORCE.DLL', 'NFS_WIN.EXE' from the CD to a folder. Rename 'NFS_WIN.EXE' to 'nfs.exe'.
- Copy 'BESTLAST.EAS', 'BESTTIME.EAS', 'EIGTH.EAS', 'FIFTH.EAS', 'FINALLAP.EAS', 'FIRST.EAS', 'FOURTH.EAS', 'SECOND.EAS', 'SEVENTH.EAS', 'SIXTH.EAS', 'THIRD.EAS' from 'FRONTEND/SPEECH' to the same folder.
- Copy 'dplay.dll' from 'REDIST\DIRECTX' folder of the CD to the same folder, or copy 'dplayx.dll' from 'Windows\SysWOW64' (64-bit OS) or 'Windows\System32'(32-bit OS) and then rename it to 'dplay.dll'. The first one is guaranteed to work while the later two may not work on some versions of Windows 10. But it is recommended to use either of the latter two.
- Copy 'NFS.CFG' to the game folder which can be downloaded from here.
- Copy 'PATHS.DAT' to 'GAMEDATA\CONFIG' in the installation folder, which can be downloaded from here.
- Open 'PATHS.DAT' with a hex editor like HxD and replace all text-strings "D:\" with the current CD drive letter, say "I:\". The replace function of the program can be used to replace all instances of "D:\" with the desired CD drive letter. This is a vital step, since the whole process will go wrong if this is not done properly. Please note that there are three instances of "D:\"
- Open DxWnd, and import this .dxw profile; right-click on the 'Need for Speed SE' entry that appears in DxWnd window and click on modify, change the path to the location of the game folder for "Path" and "Launch" pointing to 'nfs.exe'. Click OK.
- Double-click on 'Need for Speed SE' in DxWnd, the game should run. The game will display a black screen and freeze if the 'DPLAY.DLL' from the CD was used, just go to the Taskbar and click OK for the two errors that appear behind the game window. If it crashes try a few more times; if it doesn't work then it is likely because of the problem mentioned at the start.
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Other information
API
Technical specs |
Supported |
Notes |
Software renderer |
|
|
DOS video modes |
VGA, SVGA |
|
Executable |
32-bit |
64-bit |
Notes |
Windows |
|
|
|
System requirements
Original Edition
DOS |
|
Minimum |
Operating system (OS) |
4.0 |
Processor (CPU) |
Intel Pentium 75 MHz |
System memory (RAM) |
8 MB |
Hard disk drive (HDD) |
4 MB |
Video card (GPU) |
256 color VESA-compatible SVGA-compatible 512 KB of VRAM |
Sound (audio device) |
Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster 16, Sound Blaster AWE32, Sound Blaster Pro and 100% compatibles, Gravis Ultrasound/ACE and 100% Compatibles, Ensoniq Soundscape, Microsoft Sound System[3] |
Other |
Modem (For Two-Player Online Play), Null-Modem Cable (For Two-Player Local Area Play) |
Special Edition
DOS |
|
Minimum[1] |
Operating system (OS) |
5.0 |
Processor (CPU) |
Intel Pentium 75 MHz |
System memory (RAM) |
8 MB |
Hard disk drive (HDD) |
4 MB |
Video card (GPU) |
256 color VESA-compatible SVGA-compatible 512 KB of VRAM |
Sound (audio device) |
Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster 16, Sound Blaster AWE32, Sound Blaster Pro and 100% compatibles, Gravis Ultrasound/ACE and 100% Compatibles, Ensoniq Soundscape, Microsoft Sound System[3] |
Other |
2X (MPC2 compliant) CD-ROM drive, 100% Hayes compatible 9600 bps or faster modem (For Two-Player Online Play) or null-modem (For Two-Player Local Area Play) with high speed (16550 UART) serial port |
Windows |
|
Minimum[1] |
Recommended |
Operating system (OS) |
95 | |
Processor (CPU) |
Intel Pentium 75 MHz
| Intel Pentium 100 MHz |
System memory (RAM) |
12 MB |
16 MB |
Hard disk drive (HDD) |
30 MB |
50 MB |
Video card (GPU) |
256 color VESA-compatible SVGA-compatible 512 K of VRAM
| 1 MB of VRAM |
Sound (audio device) |
Windows 95 compatible sound card |
16-bit compatible sound card |
Other |
2X (MPC2 compliant) CD-ROM drive, 100% Hayes compatible 9600 bps or faster modem (For Two-Player Online Play) or null-modem (For Two-Player Local Area Play) with high speed (16550 UART) serial port |
Joystick and Microsoft mouse (ver. 7.04 and higher or 100% compatible) |
Notes
- ↑ Although the MS-DOS and Windows versions were not released in Japan, it was known as Overdrivin' DX (Japanese:オーバードライビンDX) for the PlayStation version.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 When running this game without elevated privileges (Run as administrator option), write operations against a location below
%PROGRAMFILES%
, %PROGRAMDATA%
, or %WINDIR%
might be redirected to %LOCALAPPDATA%\VirtualStore
on Windows Vista and later (more details).
References