Well, you all would be glad to know that last night I came up with a solution. The 3dsetup.exe in the setup dir on NBA Live 2000 also made by EA, loads to a .ini file whereas the one in NFS4 loads to a .dat file. I backed up the 3dsetup dir on NFS4 and then deleted it and put the one from NBA Live 2000 in there and then edited the .ini file so that its name and registry location was the same as in the .dat file in the old NFS4 dir. Then I ran the 3dsetup.exe and as it does for NBA Live 2000, it detected my V3. I thought just for fun that I'd see what happened and to my amazement, the game works AWESOME. Runs incredibly fast with Glide or D3D, whichever its using.. but it is amazing! No more software mode.. So just thought someone might want to know that if they are having the same problem, I might put together a Zip file of the contents for those who want it.
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Kris Venden