The Need for Speed with DOSBox

I recently stumbled upon my beloved old copy of the absolutely fantastic original "The Need for Speed". This fabulous game came out in 1994 and blew me away. My sister, her boyfriend (now husband) and I spend a crazy number of hours playing this game. It rocked!

How to get it to play now though...? Well, I've used the wonderful DOSBox before for playing Doom 2 and Commander Keen and the like. This software runs in Windows (XP for example) and emulates a DOS environment with an old SoundBlaster 16 soundcard. Would it work with TNFS (The Need for Speed)?

After a lot of trial and error I finally got it working after getting a tip from a forum on a site called "alldeaf" (www.alldeaf.com). I hadn't mounted the CDROM drive properly. Here's what you need to do:

Create a folder/directory on root of your C: drive called "tnfs" (i.e. c:\tnfs)
Run DOSBox
Type "mount c c:\tnfs"
Type "mount d d:\ -t cdrom"
Type d:
Type "install"
Follow the on-screen instructions

Hopefully this should do the trick for you. What a trip down amnesia lane! It really brought me back! It's still a brilliant game even if the graphics are a bit grainy.

Comments

Burby said…

Hello Steve,

funny that I did the same just now! My friends and me spend hours and hours with racing, telling each other the new minimum time.

Did you get the videosequences running? If so, I would be very interested for a "howto". For me its not visible, just jammed pixel with sound.
Thank you!
Martin

1 September 2009 at 20:46

MIke said…

Thanks for that, i still have a bit to learn about using dosbox, now there's a little bit less i need to learn.
Cheers.
Mike

28 August 2010 at 06:42

Unknown said…

When I try to do this it says the following: "getvesainfo - IVALID VESA INFO. VESA driver is installed?" Any ideas?

31 July 2011 at 15:43

Where are SCANPST.EXE and/or SCANOST.EXE?

I sometimes have to deal with customer computers whose Outlook PST or OST files have become corrupted. Very often the fix is to run SCANPST.EXE on the offending PST/OST file. However, every time I go to do this I forget where the two executable files are. Here is where they are on a Vista machine running Office 2007: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12 I hope this helps.

WSUS Issues

Was configuring WSUS on a Server 2016 VM for a customer recently and found the performance to be very sluggish and most of the time the client PCs would time-out and throw an error message when trying to check for updates. After much digging on different forums I came across a fix that worked nicely: Open Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager and click on Application Pools Then Right-Click on your WsusPool instance and choose Advanced Settings Scroll down to Private Memory Limit (KB) and change it from the default of 1843200 to 0 which means unlimited. Then right-click and stop the WsusPool and then start it again. Hope this works for you.

APC PowerChute Network Shutdown - Authentication Phrase

Was installing APC PowerChute Network Shutdown (PCNS) on a customer’s server and couldn’t find a record of the Authentication Passphrase that I set ages back on their Smart UPSes Network Management 2 Card. So I went to reset it on the card and start anew… it took a lot of digging to find it on their particular release of firmware: Go into the UPS tab, then into “shutdown” inside the “Configuration” category: You may then need to change the passphrase being used on other servers. To do this, open up PCNS in your browser and click into the area shown below:

Artifact Weblog

Search This Blog