Last time I showed you how to get Need for Speed Carbon working under windows 10 and mentioned that this could be used to run other games relying on safedisc.
I have been continuing to experiment with better ways to enjoy Need for Speed Carbon and found yet another way that works surprisingly well without the compromise to system security.
The answer is simply to use VMWare Player
It is free for personal use, and of course running a video game is pretty much personal use.
I wont go into detail on how to set up the player because VMWare Player is quite intuitive when you use it. Just click "Create a Virtual Machine" and follow the on-screen instructions. When you get to the screen below, click the button called "Customize Hardware" :
Note: Unlike the hard drive mentioned in the screen shot (5 GB), you should use at least 40 GB. The above screenshot is a mistake as I was trying to create a VM just to take a screen shot for this blog. I was going to type 50GB. So please be sure to use at least 40, or 50 GB as your virtual HDD size! Also the Memory should be what ever your game needs + 1 GB. For Need for Speed Carbon, I used a VM with 2 GB Ram allocation.
In the Customize Hardware screen, select "Display" then at the top right, CHECK the box called "Acclerate 3D Graphics"
You are done! You now just have to install the OS
The gotchas:
1) You need a legitimate OS that is windows XP or higher original install disk and key so you can install it inside the virtual machine.
2) You need OS installation experience.
However, it is a Virtual machine and anything you do inside it wont harm your computer, so experiment away!
Once you have setup your virtual machine and set up an OS that is Windows XP(service pack three) or higher, then you need to install need for speed carbon.
First tho, you MAY need to connect your CD/DVD to your VM if it isn't already set up for it. To do this, simply click on Player drop down then click on "Removable devices" and then select CD/DVD option. Now you should be able to pop in the NFS Carbon (or any other game) DVD in and install the game. Once done, it should run fine.
Performance:
- Slight jitter but quite playable.
- A few settings can be pushed to high.
VMWare ran the Guest OS at 32 bits, 1080p (without going through RDP), and virtualised 3D hardware. Hyper-V manager did none of that and only ran 1080p via RDP but still no 32 bit colour mode.
After checking out the features of VMWare player pro, versus the free version, I am convinced I need to purchase this amazing piece of virtualisation software especially when half the available features of pro is something I will use.
Ehm, back to the games at hand...
The performance I got in Need for speed carbon outlined above is on a system running VMWare Player 12 with hardware:
INTeL I7- 2600, 12 GB Ram, and an nVidia (EVGA brand) GTX560Ti card. The VM is stored on a RAID drive using Software RAID in "Stripping" mode. HOST OS is on an SSD (Samsung Evo 850). VMWare player is installed on a 2 TB Seagate Hybrid hard drive (8GB SSD Cache coupled Mechanical drive).
I have no idea how it will perform on other systems but it is a safe bet it will perform as mine did on at least a system with the mentioned hardware or better.
Happy Gaming Everyone!
