Ah, the original Need for Speed! Alpine, Coastal, Vertigo Ridge—great tracks now trapped in an out-dated game, passed by in time. As an avid road-tripper, I loved those open road tracks and the opportunity to drive with traffic in an environment that, for the time, felt realistic. I even plunked down the cash for a Thrustmaster T1 wheel and pedals.

Several years ago I had the idea to rip out those tracks and convert them to run in a modern simulator. With some help from Denis Auroux (the author of TRACKED, to my knowledge the first player-created editor for a commercial game) I was able to decode the track segments and textures. But then I got distracted, my attention turned elsewhere, life and children caught me up, and the code was left to collect dust.

Now the driving bug is biting again and I'm blowing the dust off this project as a first, small step back into simulation coding. I dug up my circa 1995 NFS SE CD and got it running on my 2009 MacBook Pro. It is…dated, as you can imagine. The steering and handling is all over the place compared to a modern sim; I have no idea how we managed those quick laps back in the day!

(As an aside, I used to run the AutoSim World Records Site back then, which you can still find in the Internet Archive. None of those records are mine though; too much time building websites and not enough racing.)

In case you feel like following along, here's how I got it working.