This developer has created a great open source cross-platform wrapper for Need for Speed II SE, that allows it to run on modern x86 and amd64 hardware. Here is a short guide on how to play this amazing game using this wrapper.

Mount the NFSIISE CD-ROM

Note: I do not want to promote piracy in this community, as I feel this community is not a good place for that discussion.

My legal backup of my Need for Speed II SE CD-ROM was for some reason in bin/cue format, so here is how I managed to extract its contents:

On Windows, I used this open-source software called WinCDEmu. It allowed me to mount the bin/cue files and extract the contents.

On Linux, I extracted the contents in two steps. First, I ran this command to convert from bin/cue to ISO (bchunk is in my distribution’s repositories):

bchunk nfs2se.bin nfs2se.cue nfs2se.iso

Then, I opened my file manager (in my case, dolphin), and right clicked the ISO file to mount it.

Download the NFSIISE Wrapper

The open-source cross-platform wrapper can be downloaded here. Download the wrapper for your operating system, extract it, and put the FEDATA and GAMEDATA directories from the CD-ROM in the wrapper’s directory.

In the case of Windows, this is all that needs to be done. The executable from the cross-platform wrapper should now run fine. On Linux, you may have to run the script titled convert_to_lowercase. You also want to make sure you have all the necessary 32-bit dependencies. I run Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, and I believe since I have steam downloaded that I already had all necessary 32-bit dependencies. In case you don’t and are on a Debian-based system, try running these commands as root:

dpkg --add-architecture i386
apt update
apt install libgx-mesa0:i386 libgl1-mesa-dri:i386 libsdl2-2.0-0:i386

Now you should be good to enjoy this 1997 classic!