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.

one could say it seems to already have budged.

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.

Then why should I trust that systems will be built that will protect my future needs?

Steal a game and you are a pirate.

Steal 1000 games and you are OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/[insert big tech company name here]

Bits have been “fair game” for decades.

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.

Whatever computer you’re using must be slower than a 4 year old phone.

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!

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.

i worked at a place where to get anything done, you had to demonstrate "Business Impact": is what you're about to do going to actually help revenue? if not, move on to something that does

i agree, a suit should only be taken seriously if the company can demonstrate that they are actively losing revenue because of the game preservation effort, otherwise toss it in the bin

why are big name businesses wasting money on litigating against small sites that dont actually impact them anyway? perhaps if they knew that their lawyers were making up figures and actually costing their company's good will, while not actually giving their business impact...

Because the lawyers can for example, argue that their current games can be future targets of unauthorized recomp'd redistributions that will impact the sales of the business.

Nintendo also sells and offers old games digitally and they have the correct rights in redistributing them which this still counts as a "actively commercial game" even if it is old.

These companies don't care about ripped and recompiled games if it is done for private use. They only care if the game and its assets are redistributed.

Even online games like World of Warcraft and its fractal of private servers, people still find value in paying for the unified experience with a unified direction by professionals.

Game developers already have the tools they need: try distributing your browser version of a game anybody cares about instead of a 20 year old game.

> yet people still go out and buy the official game.

Not all people, especially not if piracy is easy.

The same reason you buy any game. Why did anyone pay for Runescape when it ran in the browser?

Btw, with webgl/webgpu/wasm you can make high fidelity, high performant 3D games.

But browser games isn't relevant to the point. It's just piracy. The only reason this is on HN is because "click here to play a pirated game" is a lot more interesting than "download a pirated game".

Use yandex for this sort of thing

Second that, and we'd get higher quality assets. Game engines could be rewritten/rewired to support ray-tracing and what not. Exciting.

Thank you, EA.

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 it", 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...

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.

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.

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. 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 consistent with its original form of sale, 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.

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...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_in_the_United_St...

But sure, let's go to more modern examples. Are all of these easily acquired "new" these days?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Universal_Pictures_fil...

Us, Pirates: “We each do it for what we lack most.”

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 other or 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.

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.

donations are a form of "thank you", completely voluntary

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"

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

Consider a tricky grey area: you have a patreon for your youtube channel and expect most people to be donating so you can keep making videos (you get maybe, $50 a month). You also make random mods on the side. One of your mods blows up, and you get a bunch of attention. Which includes donators giving you hundreds thanking you for the mod. Are you now taking "blood money" because your tip jar for youtube content now has financial incentives to make more gaming mods?

I personally treat the tip jar as such. As long as you're not saying "pay me this much and I'll make X mod", I'm donating to a person, not a potentially morally grey cause. Maybe the Nintendo lawyer disagree with me, but that feeling has always been mutual.

The stupid part was paywalling the latest version of the emulator behind a patreon subscription (it wasn't even effective as anyone could share the latest release) which opened them up to being taken down by nintendo although it was likely they would have been taken down anyway just because the switch 2 was nearing launch and they didn't want switch emulator developers to get started on the switch 2.

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.

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.

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.

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/

Indeed. NFS:U2 came out in late Nov 2004, goes double platinum, sells 11M copies and EA shut down online multiplayer by 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 weakening a franchise game's characters (Mario, Sonic, Zelda) or entire 'cinematic universe'.

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.

Yes. The original idea of copyright was to encourage more original creation AND later modification by granting exclusivity for a limited time in exchange for making it non-exclusive forever after.

The Copyright Act of 1790 set the duration at 14 years, with a 14 year extension if the author was still living after the first 14. It's been extended 4 times and is now 70 years after the death of the author or 95 years after publication / 120 years after creation. I agree it's now a cruel joke that has nothing to do with the original intent other mocking it.

I have no hope this can be fixed in any major way because it's now a fully bi-partisan issue. The RIAA/MPAA/SPA lobbyists have demonstrated absolute, long-term control of both major parties for decades (despite what any politician claims while campaigning). There are only a handful of politicians for whom this is a hill they're willing to shed political capital on. And, in an honest moment, they'll admit the congressional process is stage managed such that regardless which party is in power at the moment (or even a super-majority), meaningfully restricting copyright closer to its original intent will always lose by at least one vote as long as the two-party duopoly controls the U.S.

Given that sad, disgusting reality, my post was trying to suggest a way to claw back the smallest, extremely limited win for non-commercial retro preservation that might: A.) Have the slightest chance of actually happening, and B.) Actually be the slightest bit better than what we have now (which is nothing). The ironic part of making any constructive suggestion to improve things even 1%, isn't that it'll almost certainly not pass the RIAA/MPAA/SPA lobby anyway, it's that those who agree with me will bury it under objections it doesn't do enough (or doesn't abolish all IP rights).

Sure, and that's what anyone into retro gaming or preservation has to do. The problem is that "law" is a legal monopoly on the use of force. So far, the retro preservation community has managed to preserve most of electronic gaming and computing's history up through around ~2010. But only because the technology didn't yet exist to make most 'legacy' digital IPs worth exploiting. There are signs the tacit truce that's existed between retro preservation and rights holders is crumbling.

Interest in retro is booming and Nintendo, EA, Sony and others are increasingly releasing new 'remasters' of retro IP. The same AI tech making decomps/recomps faster and easier for enthusiasts is also shifting the economics of retro monetization for IP rights holders. We can no longer rely on them "looking the other way" and tacitly allowing retro preservation. Rapacious media corporations are determined to squeeze every dollar from the expanded IP rights they paid a lot of political donations to purchase (California senator Nancy Pelosi is retiring a multi-hundred-millionaire). The DMCA and other provisions they bought into law are incredibly expansive. In the past, they had little reason to use them against retro gaming. Now they do.

They now have an opposition which might have the $$$ and will to fight against copyright: AI lobbyists. The world's richest man owns an AI company. As AI makes people realise just how much everything is a derivative work, and remixes of this nature become easier, I suspect the whole concept of IP is going to change dramatically and more people will question its necessity.

or doesn't abolish all IP rights

While that might not happen fully, AI might be the catalyst driving things in that direction.

otherwise there is no moat and all that fortune that you envision them spending on anti-IP lobbying would not exist in the first place.

When copyright was invented, it was mostly applied to books (not even book series / franchises), which don't cost that much to write, even if you take printing into account, and are usually written by a single author or a small team.

Nowadays, copyright is applied to huge cinematic and video game universes, which cost hundreds of billions of dollars to make, and don't have a single "author" behind them. It's a very different law for a very different reality.

When Moby Dick was written, Moby Dick was all it was. Nowadays, every new movie in a given universe is intended to bring profits on its own, but, by making that universe more popular, it increases future profits for other things in the franchise too. This is all reflected in the accounting, and requires copyright to be much longer than it once was.

We need to kill indefinite (or even long) copyright and the music industry has been one of the worst offenders.

> the characters? does an abandoned ET game open up the franchise to public domain?

I'm confused. I specifically called those examples out and suggested one way they could maybe be carved out to prevent that exact concern. Even if my suggested 'way to carve' is dumb, my point was that lack of granularity, prevents carving out anything at all.

FWIW patents usually also expire after 20 years.

Shouldn't trademarks basically take care of this?

Couldn't the same be said when the PS2 came?

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

"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.

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

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.

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.

On the website they seem to be doing NFSUG1 as well and it's my favorite version of NFS and I hope I can check it out when it's ready.

So nice to see this work in a browser on my ancient smart phone without any issue.

They also remember Screamer and Screamer 2 being great around the same time.

Seems like it's been recompiled for wasm, but how was the server built and free roam multiplayer implemented?

Lots and lots of vibecoding.

https://imgur.com/a/WSRTF7h

Disclaimer: instant start game after loading.

add ?host=1 to start a LAN/WAN game and share the link.

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.

Second, accepting donations for an EA game might be a bad idea; the recompile itself freely accessible without donations might stay around.

Which I guess is cool that LLMs can compile stuff to wasm, but there is absolutely nothing new, interesting or good about this.

We had piracy before. The only thing that changed is that it is packaged into an html wrapper now

Potentially controversial opinion but I think the WS6 has aged extremely well compared to a lot of other designs of 02-03. Those ram air scoops still look cool as fuck

Came here to make this exact comment. So good.

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.)

(Recommend turning on ghost mode! There's literally thousands of other players.)

My Pentium 4 + Geforce 6600 was struuuugling!

I've thought about this so much as I'm building my own game. I see all these amazing assets in older works like music, 3d models, textures, and so on, yet if you use any of it you're just going to get sued. I feel like there could be a good middle ground that might work for the publisher better than just keeping everything in a warehouse...

This website here is likely to be sent some not-so-polite emails soon telling them to take it down as they don't own the assets...

Especially with the rise of AI/LLM spam, you might get a DMCA or cease and desist, but the third party contracted by $RIGHTSHOLDER isn't going to go NSA-level de-anonymisation as long as you stay small scale.

After all, it is still relatively trivial to find whatever movies, TV shows, etc online from a web browser. Yandex is convenient, but DeepSeek Search API is also decent (and very cheap) too.

It will remain my all time favorite NFS game, with the best soundtrack.

Or maybe that just dates me

Anyway I found it here: https://soundcloud.com/arikitaru/sets/need-for-speed-undergr...

With the current pace of developments, there is less time to relate with most games because we have updates in <1 year (except Rockstar obv) that changes the experience.