Posted by fluxusars 12 hours ago
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…
Indeed. NFS:U2 came out in late Nov 2004, goes double platinum, sells 11M copies and EA shut down online multiplayer in Aug 2006. Reasonable debate can be had about time frames but games out of print over 20 years should be an easy call. The problem isn't just copyright duration, it's also lack of granularity. We need a middle-ground like 'Expanded Fair Use' which kicks in after 20 years and enables non-commercial sharing of the actual code, without also looping in rights to long-lived franchise characters (Mario, Sonic, Zelda) or an entire 'cinematic universe'. It's the 'all-or-nothing' that lets publishers effectively block everything by arguing "But then anyone will be able to make all-new Need For Speed or Final Fantasy games."
As for "all sorts of cool possibilities", just look at what the retro modding community has already done with HD texture packs, expansions and fan translations.
Oh boy oh boy. Time to make my boy GLM work on something.
It's been.... 13 years since I've bothered, but you'll want to also have it dig through a lot of the calculations/formulas for how things are balanced. No idea if they ever fixed it, but at one point I jokingly set the tax rate to poor people for 20% to get rid of them, and afaict this overflowed how unhappy it made them back into being maximally happy.
Not that it needs to be a perfect, literally multi-agent simulated system but the garbage collection and a few other things operate under the hood on far simpler terms than are reflected visually, IIRC the biggest issue was that the visual representation of the trucks and garbage are an approximation based off of the heat maps which are themselves just an approximation mapped to the buildings from some far simpler terms.
Not sorry to sperg out, I grew up obsessed with SC2k, was like 10 when I bought some 300 page book from B&N that broke down every single mechanic and how it was calculated and the "correct" way to win. 2013 broke my heart, I was so hype for it.
I remember the music being very good, and was sad to learn of the death of the guy who did it at EA a few years back. The menu music was amazing.
Edit: Seems I can't read! I thought this was NFS2 not NFSUG2! I still have my CDs for both! I am old.
1) extract the art (including audio and other fixture data)
2) instrument some kind of parity-checker / validator against the base game
3) /loop to have an agent rebuild the entire game the way you want
The hard part is 2) and push comes to shove you could probably pay a part time high school intern to laboriously go through the game and make sure it is a faithful recreation.
IANAL, art assets are the IP of the creators. It would certainly be illegal to host or otherwise distribute the art assets you do not own. I see the industry coming down HARD on this form of reverse engineering if only because it is so easy.
[1]: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/28/vibe-game-development/
EDIT: Shit, this is really going to incentivize game-streaming platforms (a la Google Stadia) and disincentivize gaming clients.
Any retail version of this game is mostly unplayable on modern PCs. Really appreciate the nostalgia bomb. I wasted so many hours of my life on this game on the original xbox.
Whoa!
(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
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
1. Copy NVIDIA’s Vulkan manifest to a filename Chrome’s sandbox permits:
sudo install -D -m 644 \
/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/nvidia_icd.x86_64.json \
/etc/vulkan/icd.d/nvidia_icd.json
VK_DRIVER_FILES=/etc/vulkan/icd.d/nvidia_icd.json \
google-chrome-stable \
--ozone-platform=wayland \
--enable-features=ForceEnableWebGpuInterop
(Note: running proprietary RPMFusion Nvidia drivers on Fedora KDE Wayland)
"Convenience flag for WebGPU development. Enables best-effort WebGPU support on unsupported configurations and more! Note that this flag could expose security issues to websites so only use it for your own development."
Can someone who knows about this stuff please guide us in terms of what sort of security risk we would would be exposing ourselves to?
Thanks.
Browsers on macOS do not require you to enable this feature. Does it mean it's on by default?!
Oops, meant to reply to the GP.
There is a concept in US law: a trademark can be considered abandoned if the owner does not want to get into legal fights over its use. I am not a lawyer, but I guess something like this can be said about NFS trademark and the game's copyright in general - even if EA doesn't want to fight over this, they should, otherwise they risk losing/diminishing the value of IP. For a company which has IP as its main asset, it'd be bad.
https://www.ea.com/games/need-for-speed/need-for-speed-unbou...
This same failure to defend concept doesn't apply to copyright, at all.
First song that played (for me?) was Snoop Dogg feat. The Doors. Absolutely zero chance. There's a reason they won't/can't rerelease the game.
But I think it's highly dubious to accept let alone solicit donations for copyrighted content.
Just because this game is old, does not mean they (nfsu2 [dot] xyz) own the rights to redistributing it which is what they are doing. Both the copyright for this game and the company is still live.
Even asking for donations is going to get them into trouble as well as inviting the rights holders to contact them directly.
So I don't think this site will survive for long. EA's lawyers have access to insurmountable funds which make this cat-and-mouse game disadvantageous to projects like this who are even showing the intention of asking for some form of financial contribution of support (money through donations).
> Help, bugs and questions: our Discord. > Rights holders: legal (at) nfsu2.xyz.
I wonder if the email just goes to /dev/null
No honor amongst thieves.
I miss the days when pirates did it for the love of the game.
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.
Cam: Some regular at audience-level aims a camera at the screen, usually with poor results. Easy to detect when the person in the next row gets up to go to the bathroom, if nothing else.
TS: "Telesync". Usually an inside job by a projectionist or similar, often with excellent audio (but sometimes not). Camera is usually very stable with an unoccluded view; these can be hard to detect if a viewer isn't paying particularly close attention.
Screener: Once upon a time, people with influence in things like the Academy Awards were sent physical copies of films to watch and judge a film at home. These copies were called screeners. Not as often a thing these days (with limited-access online streaming being a largely-solved problem), but they could be both very high-quality and very early. Sometimes, they included things like a periodic scroller or crawler that informed unaffiliated viewers that they were not allowed to be watching the thing they were watching. Sometimes, they also had one-off watermarks that were intended to show the source of a leak[1].
In the realm of leaky films, screeners were/are usually the superior format by a wide margin.
[1]: https://waxy.org/2014/01/ellen_degeneres_walter_mitty_screen...
Will EA sell me Need for Speed Underground 2? Nope! They won't even acknowledge it exists on their website:
https://www.ea.com/games/need-for-speed
Just look under the "Need for Speed Games" menu. It's not even there in the sense of "we're proud of our heritage, look at a history of our old games."
I think this is what makes movie piracy a lot less romanticized. For the most part, Universal Studios is willing to sell me an old movie for a fair price. I bought the 4K remaster of Lawrence of Arabia for $5 on the Apple TV Store recently, and that's a very fair price. It's mostly the software and especially the game industry that is hostile to this idea.
I think copyright law should be modified to have more consideration for the rights holder's commercial abandonment. I would change it to add these parameters:
If a copyrighted work was sold to the general public at any point, and the rights-holder no longer sells that product in a way that a reasonable person would purchase and consume that work, or is no longer for sale in a manner reasonably consistent with its original form of sale (e.g., they used to sell Need for Speed Underground 2 as a one-time purchase but now it's only available as a subscription, or the price has been changed from $50 to $3,000), people are then free to copy and redistribute that work for non-commercial purposes, although they may collect donations for the purposes of covering distribution cost so long as they don't make those donations a prerequisite for the end consumer's access of the copyrighted work. The redistributor would also not be allowed to represent themselves as the rights-holder or do anything that would confuse people into thinking they were the original source of the work.
So I can go to the store and buy any of these? No? Huh. Sounds like this is largely untrue for most films ever produced commercially.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Universal_Pictures_fil...
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.
donations are a form of "thank you", completely voluntary
Piracy has never been about the culture or game preservation or whatever. It’s about getting free stuff for 99% of pirates. There are people across the spectrum with additional motivations, for instance maybe somebody was annoyed by the state of streaming and it drove them to piracy. But at the end of the day, the vast majority people are downloading the stuff they want because it’s 1) free and 2) available to them.
I fully support piracy but I also don’t pretend it’s some high-minded philosophical reason. There are moments where that element comes into play for me, especially when it comes to losing media, but I’m not going to sit here and pretend that is the number one reason anyone opens up Pirate Bay or whatever came before.
In case it wasn’t clear before I very much support piracy. What I don’t like is people making up high-minded reasons as window dressing. The percentage of people doing it for “legitimate” or otherwise “good” reasons is very, very small. On the other hand, I also don’t think online piracy inflicts enough harm for it to be necessary to make an excuse.
As for people who make it possible, that’s another thing entirely and I agree!
Obviously not to the degree of long term professional archiving but I do think it is a form of preservation to a greater degree than an average home user doing 3-2-1. The greatest risk of loss comes from people not resharing all their content when the private trackers disappear.
Us, Pirates: “We each do it for what we lack most.”
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"
Came here to make this exact comment. So good.
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.
Looking a bit more into it, they are now selling the game again, with some track removed (notably "space oddity").
NFSU2 is known for its iconic music, so I am not sure they could sell copies without at least some of the more iconic original music.
A firm has generational culture locked up, and won’t take money for even a low-effort re-release?
Nobody’s being harmed, here.
Now, please vibecode me a winxp directx driver that serializes calls to its wasm counterpart, to enable graphics acceleration for such VMs. Sounds highly doable: virgl, virtio-gpu and Venus exist. Might be even simpler to do it for Vulkan and port dxvk to XP.
Introduced me to so much music that shapped my musical tastes for years afterwards.
I miss this era of games when it felt like there was genuine inovation and competition in games and consoles. THPS2, THUG, Need for Speed. WWE all of them had unbelivable soundtracks and felt like they were trying to push the envelope with new features.
Was the 2000s-2015 the golden age of modern gaming?
It was the age of games being so difficult to make that you could only find things that survive the enduring process. There was still shovelware, but it was rare compared to what you find on Steam in 2026.