NFS Hot Pursuit (2010) – Change Language, Fix Crash On Race, Windowed, Resolution

The highly anticipated Need for Speed : Hot Pursuit has finally hit the shelves. This game, which is a reboot of the 1998’s NFS 3, is the 16th installment of the long running NFS franchise which is now over 15 years old. I’ve had the opportunity to play the game for several hours and to be honest it looked good and was pretty enjoyable. Of course, this is by no means a true racing simulation – if you are looking for one go play GRID. Hot Pursuit instead is an arcade racer – its not ultra realistic but nevertheless fun to play. Anyway, before this post turns into yet another NFS review, let us tell you that this is our routine troubleshooting article for Hot Pursuit 2010. Hopefully, the tips and workarounds mentioned below will help you avert bugs, glitches, crashes and other annoyances with this new NFS title.

How to fix NFS Hot Pursuit crash to desktop (CTD) after selecting race

Judging by the number of people complaining on various gaming forums, this seems to be a fairly common problem. The game sometimes seem to crash when running on processors with 4 cores. You can try either one of the solutions mentioned below to try and fix this issue:

Set the NFS process to use only two cores

Instead of setting your computer to use two cores, you can try enforcing this restriction on NFS HP process only.

  1. Start the game. Immediately start Task Manager
  2. Locate the NFS hot Pursuit process in the processes list.
  3. Right click the process and select ‘Set Affinity’.
  4. Tick only two processor cores, preferably Processor 0 and 1. Press ok and close the dialog.
  5. Switch back to the game and try selecting a race.

If this method does not work, try the solution below.

Set your computer to use only two cores

  1. Run System Configuration utility. Typing msconfig in the start menu run or search box should do the trick.
  2. Switch to ‘Boot’ tab.
  3. Select ‘Advanced Options’
  4. Set ‘Number of Processors’ to 2.
  5. Restart your computer and run the game.

While the crash on race selection may get fixed, note that your computer will now only use only two processor cores instead of 4. You may want to undo the above change once you stop playing.

How to change language in NFS Hot Pursuit

  1. Open Registry Editor. Type regedit in start menu run or search box.
  2. Locate the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Electronic Arts\Need for Speed(TM) Hot Pursuit\1.0 (on 64-bit systems)
    OR
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Electronic Arts\Need for Speed(TM) Hot Pursuit\1.0 (on 32-bit systems)
  3. Change the Language key value to ‘English’ and Locale key value to ‘en_US’.

It may be possible to switch to other languages/locales if you are using a MULTILANGUAGE release. However, I personally have not tried it.

How to manually edit NFS Hot Pursuit configuration settings

It is possible to manually edit your configuration settings files to tweak settings you can’t change in game.

  1. Browse to c:\Documents And Settings\\My Documents\Criterion Games\Need for Speed(TM) Hot Pursuit\
  2. Open the config.NFS11Save file with a text editor.

Most of the display options are listed under the [Display] section of above file.

How to run NFS Hot Pursuit in windowed mode

  1. Open the config.NFS11Save file as stated above.
  2. Browse to the [Display] section.
  3. Set fullscreen=false. Save and close the file.
  4. Run the game.

How to change resolution in NFS Hot Pursuit

  1. Open the config.NFS11Save file as stated earlier.
  2. Browse to the [Display] section.
  3. Alter width and height properties to fit your desired resolution. For example, values for 800x600 resolution would be : Width=800
    Height=600
  4. Save and close the file.
  5. Run the game.

Note that adding a resolution unsupported by your video card/monitor would cause black screen issues when trying to launch the game.

Please keep in mind that this article is a work in progress - more fixes will be added here as and when they are discovered. Check this space for updates.

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