For a long time, I’ve been avoiding posts with fixes I discover myself but I’ve noticed that people need these fixes and I should make them public. When I started playing Need for Speed Hot Pursuit on the PC, I had a certain issue at times when the game would crash either on the start or when pressing “Enter Any Key” screen.

Criterion has released 5 patches since the launch of the game and none of the patches fix this issue. However, I’ve found the culprit behind the problem and that’s the config files for the game. If you’re experiencing this issue, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to “Documents\Criterion Games\Need for Speed(TM) Hot Pursuit” folder. (Win7/Vista – 32/64 both).
2. You should be able to see a file called “config.NFS11Save“. Delete that file.
3. Move inside the folder called “Save\Default“.
4. You will find another config file called “controls.NFS11Save“. Delete that file as well.
5. Launch the Game now.

There’s really no need to save or backup the files deleted because they will be recreated by the game. It will definitely work. Enjoy.

To explain what’s wrong; Well, it’s probably because the game tries to actively map the hardware configuration IRQs or handlers from these config files without checking if the hardware is actually connected at the correct addresses and thus crashes. Criterion, if you’re reading this, please fix it.

UPDATE: Post updated to reflect the latest version and should work for Firefox 7,8,9.

Here’s a small but useful post for people, who use Internet Download Manager and have recently moved to Firefox 9. The old Firefox add-on that came with IDM is not compatible with Firefox 9. There are alternative solutions on the internet like the FlashGot extension. Anyhow, it’s a simple matter of a new add-on. Download the add on below and install it on your Firefox 9 browser.

http://www.internetdownloadmanager.com/idmmzcc/idmmzcc.xpi

1- Open Firefox,
2- Paste the link to the address bar and Go,
3- Wait for the download,
4- Restart Firefox,
5- Enjoy.

Alternatively, if the above link doesn’t work for some reason or is an older one. Here’s one hosted on my site with the latest version. This works with Firefox 9 as well.

Internet Download Manager 7.3.10.xpi Firefox 7,8,9

So, there’s been a lot of talk about Flash and HTML5. We’re not going to get into that here. What I saw on the Adobe Max conference was good. Flash getting into hardware accelerated worlds. That’s all good and dandy. But will it really be what “Flash turned hardcore” developers want? Or developers who were already hardcore and were only waiting for flash to spiff it up. Time will tell.

But, I’ve prepared what you can call a pre emptive scale to see how I want Flash or hardware acceleration to be. If it achieves any percentage near to this, I’ll buy my apples from Adobe. Eh? That was weird…

Then again, I’ve been working on Papersteer for the sole reason of measuring the raw power of these technologies and how they scale up to each other. Before, I move forward, I must tell you that although Flash is doing software only drawing for now, it has amazed me. Flash is indeed good. Thumbs up Adobe. Alright, no more babbling from me, take a look at this movie:

This video demonstrates the difference in computation and drawing on different platforms. From software drawing to parallel processing.

The demos use Opensteer to demonstrate the results.