Want to play the classic racer Need For Speed II SE on Linux? There's an open source engine for that

Awesome! One of the games of my childhood! I do love it! <3

PS: How well does the AI work? Does the game feel like the original game? It's not the Case with Caesarium.


Last edited by cRaZy-bisCuiT on 20 June 2016 at 7:03 pm UTC

I really love the effort that people can put to develop open source gaming engine recreation or emulators.
This really helps preserving video game history.

Oooh, I loved this game. I'm pretty sure it's not aged well. :-) I have the disc for it somewhere, I wonder if I can find it...

I can only find one copy available on Amazon priced at $50, which is frankly insane considering the age of it :/

EDIT: Wow, this is not trivial to compile on Ubuntu :/ Anyone know how to cleanly install libsdl1.2-dev:i386 ?


Last edited by Cybolic on 20 June 2016 at 7:32 pm UTC

Is the FZR2000 included? :D

I'll give it a try! My CD was lying directly behind my monitor on a big pile of discs, which were considered for the trashcan. I hope it is compatible with the Green Pepper version...

I may be mistaken, but as far as I know they disassembled the game binaries. That would make it a bit problematic in a legal sense.

Quoting: CybolicEDIT: Wow, this is not trivial to compile on Ubuntu :/ Anyone know how to cleanly install libsdl1.2-dev:i386 ?

I'll try to create a 32bit VM. This should be much easier!

I had similar problems with the official mail client, which is used by our university. For Linux, there is only an old 32bit client available. I tried to install this on 64bit Ubuntu without success. I think the installation of 32bit Java was the biggest problem. On 32bit Ubuntu, it worked like a charm. Luckily, this client is only needed for setting up the automatic mail filters, while the main functionality can be reached from the extremely dumbed-down web interface.

This is one of the big reasons I moved away from Debian. Multi arch support is a pain. Your can force mutli arch support but it gives you a bunch of scary warnings. You can try to find 32 bit versions but the support is sparse. Fedora has great multiarch support, I run 32 execs and compile 32 source on my 64 bit machine quite frequently.

One thing you can do on Debian/Ubuntu, which I have done in the past, is create 32 chroot in your 64 bit system. You have to bind mount some dirs like /dev but it works really well, just wasteful as you have to maintain full installs of 64 bit and 32 bit at the same time.

This is awesome though, Ive been using dosbox for Need for Speed 1, with openglide for Tombraider and some other dos games. Now I can get Need for Speed 2 also.


Last edited by m2mg2 on 20 June 2016 at 8:11 pm UTC

The developer decompiled it and replaced all the legacy windowing and OS integration with something portable. A remarkable achievement. This is the reason why the game is fully implemented and only runs on 32-bit.

Quoting: MilaniumThe developer decompiled it and replaced all the legacy windowing and OS integration with something portable. A remarkable achievement. This is the reason why the game is fully implemented and only runs on 32-bit.

I just looked at the code and that does indeed seem to be the case! It looks something like a miniature Wine-implementation based on SDL2, re-implementing just the calls that NFSIISE uses. I don't know about international law (or law in general, IANAL), but this doesn't look particularly legal.
It would be very nice if it could be the basis of an official port though!