- [LGR] What a magnificent, high quality track right here.

This is like. [laughs]

Oh no, oh no!

[electrical floppy drive buzzing]

Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing,

and this one is, "We All Need Extra Speed".

"Extra tracks for the Need for Speed," for DOS PCs.

A highly unusually thing for a multitude of reasons.

For one thing, modding

in the original "Need for Speed" for DOS

is just something you typically think about.

For the most part, it really took off for the modding scene

with "Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit".

I mean, there were also some mods for II and II SE,

and of course this, obviously, since we have this here.

But, yeah.

The fact that this exists is just amusing to me

and it's something that I've been after

for a very long time now.

Was never able to actually find a copy of this.

For one thing, it was only sold in the UK and Europe,

or, you know, various countries really,

but this mysterious company called UK Gold.

Amusingly, as far as I can tell,

they were actually based in the Netherlands.

They released several unofficial add-on packs, like this,

at retail, with mods and add-ons for games like

"Command & Conquer", "Warcraft II" and "Red Alert".

Each with there on cheeky titles and [laughs]

interesting artwork.

This one in particular amuses me

because it has a Ferrari 288 GTO from the mid '80s,

something that is not the game whatsoever.

Not only that, but it seems to be taken from the "Turbo Cup"

or at least, they were using the same artwork

that was perhaps purchased from some stock artwork thing.

I don't even know.

Either way this is not the only package at retail

that feature this 288 GTO.

Which is, I dunno, it's just one of things

that as a car guy and a collector of PC game boxes,

both gets on my nerves and makes me happy.

Anyway, yeah, look at that, "500 plus tracks

for 'Need for Speed'.

"Free bonus.

"30 racing games and 200 plus car pictures."

Yeah.

So this was sent to me recently,

in fact I think there's the note still in here,

by a viewer of LGR named David.

He has his own channel, Deckard Games.

And apparently he found this second copy here in France.

And yeah, he found his own and set this one along my way

because he knew that I was looking for it.

But yeah, it's just a CD in a box,

there was no documentation.

In fact I've never seen any documentation

for this posted online.

It just says, "Read the README text

before using the CD."

And then there's also this floppy disk

that it came with as well.

This just has another selection

of track editing files on it,

in fact it might be some of the same that are on the CD,

I'm not sure what it actually came with that.

Anyway, let's just go ahead and take a look a the CD itself.

Stick this in a computer

and mess around with the some of the tracks it came with

and go from there because I've been quite curious

to see what's actually on this thing.

All right, got the "We All Need Extra Speed" CD

inserted into my IBM ThinkPad 380XD here.

And running Windows 95 with Windows Explorer open here.

You can see that it provides you, not much.

You get an Xtrspeed directory,

filled with a bunch more folders and some files.

Get a README and this See executable.

And this is just a very simple file viewer here,

but it allows you to see things.

You know, browse what's on the disc.

But that's it, it doesn't actually bring up a menu system

for selecting individual programs.

You know, the utilities or the tracks.

You can kind of just look at them through here

and that's it, it's just a file viewer.

I was expecting more of an involved menu system, but nope!

And then there's some instructions here

which are rather confusing, they're kinda wrong.

It's like, "Install the things by copying over

"whatever tracks you want

"into your 'Need for Speed' directory

and then install the game."

Which makes no sense,

you wanna od that the other way around.

But most important thing to take away from this is

it needs a custom install to get that miscellaneous folder

with the track data onto your hard disk,

so you can overwrite them and use the custom tracks.

But, yeah, otherwise it doesn't tell you

where any of this stuff is.

I mean, you could figure it out,

but highly underwhelming.

It really is just a collection of stuff

that they've found on the internet and slapped onto CD.

Anyway, let's go ahead and look at the tracks though,

because thankfully these are divided up

in somewhat of a coherent way.

So you have these folders here that just say

what tracks they're supposed to overwrite these TRI

or tri files are individual tracks,

but, again, it doesn't really tell you what they are.

There's no READMEs, there's no names, just numbers

and they're all gonna have to be renamed anyway

so that the game will recognize them.

So, whatever, at least it tells you which track files

are s'pose to go to what.

So here's these tracks that are gonna overwrite Alpine

or sections of the of the Alpine tracks.

Autumn Valley, you got City, Coastal, Lost Vegas,

Rusty Springs, and Vertigo Ridge.

And then you have these tracks one

and two folders here. [laughs]

It's like the, whoops, it's like the same

as all those other ones, it doesn't tell you which

tracks are suppose to be overwriting.

You can kinda figure it out like, AL2 is Alpine two.

Here's one that actually straight-up tells you,

you got Vertigo Ridge, it's gonna be overwriting.

And, oh look, Geoffrey Brown made this using Tracked.

So it does sometimes have information in these folders,

but for the most part it's extremely vague.

Same, well not so much the same with this one.

This more what I was expecting, you know?

Actual titles and README files that go with them

tells you who made it and what they are

and what the idea is behind it,

and things like that. [laughs]

So, I mean, yeah, this is a little more coherent,

but again, it still is just a collection of files,

you gotta install these yourself.

Or you can try using one of the programs that it came with.

Just briefly here, let me mention

these others that it comes with.

Clrscore, this is not a program, it's just Config.dat.

This is just a high score or really the times file

that "Need for Speed" makes.

This is so that you can clear it out because, obviously,

if you are setting times on custom tracks

it's gonna mess up the balance of everything.

This is the, what is this?

Track editing tools?

Yes, or utilities.

I remember using this briefly back in the day.

It lets you view tracks and mess around

with different parameters within said track files.

That's handy.

And then Tracked or Tracked.

This is what I used, I mean, really everyone used,

to make custom tracks for "The Need for Speed".

That's a thing.

Maybe we'll try to make a track later,

but for now let's just try Track Manager, here.

And this is something that I wish

that I had back in the day, it's by Mike Latimer.

It's sort of a menu system that helps.

Again the README for the actual Xtrspeed disc here

doesn't tell you about that.

Kinda wish it did, it's really the most

useful program on the disc.

We'll get these other folders later, but yeah,

for now let's just take a look here at NFSTM,

the Track Manager.

So I have the original "Need for Speed" right here,

in the Nfs directory.

Also tried this with NFS SE and nothing seemed to work.

So I believe that they

really intended a lot of these tracks,

at least all the ones that I've tried,

to work with the original NFS.

So that's what we're gonna be playing with.

Anyway, Track Manager.

Let's get this opened up.

So the first time you run it here,

it takes you through a set up process.

And yeah, you can try the automatic setup, but I dunno,

we're gonna do a little bit custom,

'cause I have somethings in different spots.

So "Need for Speed" directory and the directory

for the miscellaneous files,

which are mostly track files and what not.

So that is this.

And then the import directory.

So this is NFS track manager,

and I have them put in the tracks sub-folder.

At this point I've gotta insert

the original "Need for Speed" CD-ROM,

so they can actually copy over all of the original files,

and provide back-up for them.

So that's nice, it takes care of things that really

you could just do on your own,

but it's nice that it does things. [laughs]

Whatever, here we are in the Track Manager program itself.

This is nice.

So you can actually configure the courses here,

these are the ones we can overwrite.

And you can overwrite them by segment,

and if we had any tracks imported, you know,

the customs from the CD, then we would see them here.

We don't right now, so let's go ahead and do that.

So Import Tracks.

And if we go over into one of these,

like say, we could just copy over this one.

And I'm gonna put it over into the tracks directory.

We'll call this, alpine.tri.

Doesn't really matter what we name these,

it's gonna be renaming them anyway.

Let's do one one for Alpine, let's just do one for Coastal.

And we'll do Rusty Springs, how about that?

Yeah.

And that's that.

We'll go back into the Tracker Manager

and do 2, for Import Tracks, and there we go.

"Import this new track,"

it sees what I just copied over, Alpine.

And we will overwrite Alpine, Segment One,

I'm gonna call it Farts because it really doesn't matter.

This description stuff and naming is gonna change

anything in-game, it's just for the track manager itself.

Import this, yes, let's do that for Coastal.

Segment One, Blerg.

Meh, and that is that.

And really, it's not doing much at this point,

but it's part of it's process.

So I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt.

Rusty Springs.

Rusty Balls.

And that's that.

So it has imported tracks, quote, unquote.

Hadn't actually copied them to the game yet.

In order to do that we go into Configure Tracks, here.

Alpine, Segment One, and see now we have that one

that we just imported.

There we go.

Now it has copied over that track file, the TRI,