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…
mvcosta91 7 minutes ago [-]
Sim City (2013) with large maps.
Oh boy oh boy. Time to make my boy GLM work on something.
donatj 18 minutes ago [-]
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.
cite_please 6 minutes ago [-]
Having game designers rather than film school hacks might have something to do with it.
rustyhancock 2 hours ago [-]
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.
m00dy 1 hours ago [-]
Multiplayer works, great job!
honkostani 44 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
PorciiVorbesc 1 hours ago [-]
>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.
hobofan 52 minutes ago [-]
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.
sigmoid10 39 minutes ago [-]
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.
brink 24 minutes ago [-]
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.
origini 1 hours ago [-]
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"
m00dy 1 hours ago [-]
you can always use monero or (btc and then mixer) or (eth and then tornado cash)
origini 1 hours ago [-]
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.
m00dy 60 minutes ago [-]
yeah you're right, the financial system as a surveillance tool at its finest.
popcar2 14 minutes ago [-]
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:
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.
leni536 1 minutes ago [-]
I was pleasantly surprised recently with the lutris install scripts on Linux for NFSU2. I remember a few years ago struggling with it, it ran but often crashed in the middle of the game.
gonzalohm 2 hours ago [-]
What do you mean about Alan Wake? It's available in online stores
sufficientsoup 2 hours ago [-]
It was temporarily removed some years back
DANmode 36 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
graso 26 minutes ago [-]
It is surprising that it works decently on an old Android phone (A525G)
jon-wood 11 minutes ago [-]
This game ran smoothly on a PlayStation 2, which is massively less performant than even the cheapest phones these days.
tap-snap-or-nap 2 hours ago [-]
It played perfectly for me, very nostalgic. Amazed how it just worked.
bix6 14 minutes ago [-]
One of my all time favorites! God bless.
zacian 2 hours ago [-]
Riders on the storm ...
redbell 1 hours ago [-]
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.
BLKNSLVR 16 minutes ago [-]
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.
gbraad 3 hours ago [-]
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).
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!
hexad74 2 hours ago [-]
This is fun. It reminds me a bit of Lego Racers from 1999.
theropost 2 hours ago [-]
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!
andix 1 hours ago [-]
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.
senfiaj 2 hours ago [-]
For me performance is poor, it's unplayable. To run the game, I had to turn on Chrome's enable-unsafe-webgpu setting.
lbreakjai 19 minutes ago [-]
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.
senfiaj 11 minutes ago [-]
On Ubuntu WebGPU and Vulkan was disabled, after enabling, it ran well.
KMnO4 2 hours ago [-]
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.
senfiaj 2 hours ago [-]
Just enabled a couple of flags (#enable-vulkan, #default-angle-vulkan), now it's good.
tarruda 1 hours ago [-]
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.
assadkhan84 1 hours ago [-]
Wow, that brough back some memories, thank you for sharing this :) are there more available?
tevlon 3 hours ago [-]
serious question: how is this legal?
DANmode 39 minutes ago [-]
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.
m00dy 1 hours ago [-]
I think we've abandoned rule-based world order.
DANmode 38 minutes ago [-]
What, on the Internet?
Bits have been “fair game” for decades.
hobofan 2 hours ago [-]
It's not
Ampersander 2 hours ago [-]
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.
jon-wood 7 minutes ago [-]
What a bleak future. People can’t have any protection for things they pour thousands of hours of work into because the needs of Anthropic have to take precedence.
In the case of NFSU2, a game which EA refuse to make available anywhere, I’m fine with people throwing a free version on the internet but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. Copyright is a part of what allows small indie studios making fun things possible because it means it’s viable to sell those things and pay people’s salaries. Maybe if along with the machine god and death of copyright we also get some form of wealth distribution which means people don’t need to fund food and shelter via their work I’ll get on board but I’m not holding my breath here.
serf 2 hours ago [-]
>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.
rvz 19 minutes ago [-]
As long as lawyers love money, that will not change.
thrownawaysz 2 hours ago [-]
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]
sgt 3 hours ago [-]
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.
ReptileMan 2 hours ago [-]
Give us Porsche Unleashed ... that was proper great NFS.
dainiusse 16 minutes ago [-]
+1, except some levels were hard ones
polytely 2 hours ago [-]
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
breisa 2 minutes ago [-]
I imagine they will just switch to offering cloud gaming exclusively. It allows them to sell to anyone with a screen, regardless of specs. It also aligns perfectly with the ongoing death of local gaming hardware.
rfgplk 11 minutes ago [-]
It's time companies start actually releasing the source to games, rather than hiding behind a billion layers of DRM.
jareklupinski 2 hours ago [-]
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
KronisLV 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
rvz 51 seconds ago [-]
> But that’s not the world we live in. Personally I think that even projects like SPT-AKI are okay.
It costs EA nothing and their owners have funds from sources that make the cat-and-mouse game expensive for the reuploaders.
bajard 2 hours ago [-]
It's 2026, and we still haven't solved the aliasing problems.
7Chinguun7 3 hours ago [-]
thats so cool bro and how is the performance like? Also can you use a controller?
Rendered at 14:08:53 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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…
Oh boy oh boy. Time to make my boy GLM work on something.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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
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.
A firm has generational culture locked up, and won’t take money for even a low-effort re-release?
Nobody’s being harmed, here.
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.
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!
Whatever computer you’re using must be slower than a 4 year old phone.
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.
Bits have been “fair game” for decades.
In the case of NFSU2, a game which EA refuse to make available anywhere, I’m fine with people throwing a free version on the internet but let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. Copyright is a part of what allows small indie studios making fun things possible because it means it’s viable to sell those things and pay people’s salaries. Maybe if along with the machine god and death of copyright we also get some form of wealth distribution which means people don’t need to fund food and shelter via their work I’ll get on board but I’m not holding my breath here.
one could say it seems to already have budged.
Steal a game and you are a pirate.
Steal 1000 games and you are OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/[insert big tech company name here]
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 costs EA nothing and their owners have funds from sources that make the cat-and-mouse game expensive for the reuploaders.