Need for Speed Underground 2 online in the browser
nfsu2.xyz196 points by fluxusars 4 hours ago
196 points by fluxusars 4 hours ago
I played this when it was new, taking turns at the keyboard of my friend’s gaming PC. Kind of wild to revisit on my phone today and have it work perfectly.
I wish the circumstances around abandonware games weren’t so tenuous, there’s so much great stuff out there and reverse engineering with AI unlocks all sorts of cool possibilities. The multiplayer features here have me thinking about other old games that could be brought online and how fun it could be. SimCity 2000 where all the neighboring cities are real and operated by other players…
Been playing it the last few days along with a few races with friends, it's pretty wild that this is even possible. The only downside is that this website isn't legal and now that it's popular it's probably getting a takedown soon.
But NFSU2 is abandonware that isn't available anymore so I hope they just leave it alone.
Also FYI for people on Linux, you need to enable unsafe WebGPU features for this to work. I use this command to make it work on Chromium:
chromium --enable-unsafe-webgpu --ozone-platform=x11 --use-angle=vulkan --enable-features=Vulkan,VulkanFromANGLE
Something about the like soft almost dream like lighting of this era of games just feels so much more comforting and inviting than todays hyper realistic graphics.
Huge fan of bringing back older games and updating.
But I think it's highly dubious to accept let alone solicit donations for copyrighted content.
>But I think it's highly dubious to accept let alone solicit donations for copyrighted content.
No honor amongst thieves.
I miss the days when pirates did it for the love of the game.
I think the piracy scene has in many aspects always been romaticized to some degree.
With movies more so than with games, the piracy scene and the organized/commercalized bootleg scene were never far apart. Few people sit in a cinema with a camcorder "for the love of the game" and risk criminal charges, while many people will do the same thing for a few hundred bucks.
The movie ripper scene in particular doesn't need any love for the game, because anyone with the balls to do so can walk into a cinema and set up a telesync. Breaking copyright protection on a game is something that required an enormous skillset that was unachievable for most people before AI. In particular stuff like Denuvo is a constant battle of wits with the DRM people.
CyberLeek with the GTA6 fiasco is a great example.
They started with a mission "for the gamers" to preserve consumer rights and force Rockstar to publish physical copies of the game, and it ended with them streaming nudes of the main character to pump their meme-coin.
As a capitalist, I agree.
A company like EA, being known for protecting their critical assets, should not accept that someone is stealing their content from 22 years ago and then even asking for donations.
we should write to EA legal team asap.
/s
"I think it might be quite risky for them to ask for donations, might get them into more trouble"
you can always use monero or (btc and then mixer) or (eth and then tornado cash)
Yeah but that will not lead to spontanious $5 donation. And i bet, based on the project itself, that the person did not think it through at all. So he would need to buy the server anonomous and the domain too.
This is great, I have been thinking about revisiting this old game. Unfortunately, it is not available for sale anywhere (probably for music licensing issues, see other games such as Alan Wake), and older versions don't run as well as they could.
I do find it legally dubious to also host the assets, but at least they make it easy to jump in.
Free roam with online players is such a great concept! However, playing in the browser is not ideal. Are the extra features (name claims, multiplayer free roam, etc) available in a native version? It is unclear to me whether https://github.com/TalhaMudo/NFSU2Recomp includes these extra goodies.
A relatively good resource to discover game recompilations is https://recomp.gg/, but there is no obvious way to contribute, and no search functionalityy.
> I do find it legally dubious to also host the assets, but at least they make it easy to jump in.
A firm has generational culture locked up, and won’t take money for even a low-effort re-release?
Nobody’s being harmed, here.
One of my all time favorites! God bless.
It is surprising that it works decently on an old Android phone (A525G)
This game ran smoothly on a PlayStation 2, which is massively less performant than even the cheapest phones these days.
It played perfectly for me, very nostalgic. Amazed how it just worked.
Riders on the storm ...
Oh, I really didn't expected it to play smoothly on my six years old phone (Samsung S20+),Kudos!
I didn't play much NFS back then, the two racing games that I played mostly in the past were Screamer 2 & Test Drive 6.
Screamer 2, I had a copy of that, wow that brings back partial fragments of memories. That's going back a ways. I think I spent a fair bit of time in that one.
I guess this was made with automatic shift in mind? There are no controls for manual shifting on-screen. Did not find an easy way to enable this. Stutters often due to asset loading. Not a very pleasant experience... and likely very illegal to distribute/host (though I 'own' this game).
https://voxelblox-notes.pages.dev/play/
This stuff is fun lately, I've been working on an engine for a while and ported a little game over to the browser here. It's a voxel kart racer as a browser project. Think classic kart racing, but with a voxel aesthetic. It's a fun little experiment, so I figured I'd share it here!
This is fun. It reminds me a bit of Lego Racers from 1999.
Thanks! Still needs a bit of work and polish, of course, but glad you enjoyed it! It includes multiplayer as well, which I've done a bit of testing on. If you notice anything or have any suggestions, feel free to let me know. I enjoy tinkering with these kinds of projects!
Can I selfhost this game locally? I have the suspicion it won't stay online for long.
The chaos of all of the other players joining in career mode is really funny.
For me performance is poor, it's unplayable. To run the game, I had to turn on Chrome's enable-unsafe-webgpu setting.
It's odd, it worked flawlessly on a M2 Macbook air running Firefox. I usually have to switch to Chrome for anything fancier than just browsing.
For comparison, I get a perfect frame rate on an iPhone 14.
Whatever computer you’re using must be slower than a 4 year old phone.
Just enabled a couple of flags (#enable-vulkan, #default-angle-vulkan), now it's good.
I remember playing this on a PC when it came out. Graphics still looks good today and is surprisingly playable on a 8 inch tablet.
Wow, that brough back some memories, thank you for sharing this :) are there more available?
serious question: how is this legal?
A young person asked me this same question about the demo the private jet company put out a few months ago showing the satellite view from the “seat” of any flight path in the world…
It honestly made me really sad.
I’m especially confused in the context of technology (are you familiar with the historical context of the term “hacker”? serious question!).
Yes: people do things all day every day not explicitly allowed or protected by law.
It's not
It could become legal in the future. I don't see how we can have machine god and copyright, and it's clearly copyright that has to budge.
>It could become legal in the future. I don't see how we can have machine god and copyright, and it's clearly copyright that has to budge.
one could say it seems to already have budged.
It's not but who cares at this point when regular people see that the big tech companies commiting the biggest robbery of the century and nothing happens.
Steal a game and you are a pirate.
Steal 1000 games and you are OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/[insert big tech company name here]
I still am not sure whether wasm/webgl is suitable for 3d games with some complexity. You'll eventually have some GC pauses during game play. This one included, despite the rest of the game being smooth.
Give us Porsche Unleashed ... that was proper great NFS.
i really worry about what the big game developers are going to do to fight against these types of projects. wondering if we are fucking up the future of game preservation because people want to generate web versions of games they like
It's time companies start actually releasing the source to games, rather than hiding behind a billion layers of DRM.
its not a definite, but it seems that the projects that get taken down the quickest are the ones that try to run ads / monetize the work
the people that just put out a cute site and stay low tend not to attract lawyers
> the people that just put out a cute site and stay low tend not to attract lawyers
Some lawyers are extremely litigious.
This might be daydreaming and wholly unreasonable, but I think that it should go like this: “As a developer/publisher you either provide a product available for purchase for a reasonable price (not larger than release price, adjusted for inflation) OR you are not allowed to take down game preservation efforts.”
Can’t afford to patch the game for vulnerabilities in the code or host servers? That’s okay, the community will do that for you after they reverse engineer it.
But that’s not the world we live in. Personally I think that even projects like SPT-AKI are okay.
It's 2026, and we still haven't solved the aliasing problems.
thats so cool bro and how is the performance like? Also can you use a controller?