Getting nfs high stakes to work better on win7

Years back, I played this game all the time
After playing some of the much more recent shift 2, and failing to get past the drifting (dont have a steering wheel :( ) thought of playing this again, this time on windows 7

There already exist many good tutorials getting it to work on 7
but there are a few small problems
the patch (v4.50) runs the game using PatchNFS.exe
starting this up always redirects the game to the network play screen, displays an "Unkown error" (network connection failed probably due to server changes in the past 10 years), there are no title movies, and the game needs to mount the iso to play

So I started looking at the exe to see if I could make some changes

the main nfs exe: nfshs.exe, is no longer securom protected in the patch, this makes things much easier

starting up this exe gives us an error message telling what arguments are needed
these are probably passed by the loader PatchNFS.exe

searching for the movie file locations can lead to where the movie's played

I found this here:

mov eax, offset aEatumble_mad ; "EAtumble.mad"
call playMovie
mov eax, offset aNfstitle_mad ; "NFStitle.mad"

here EAtumble refers to the ea logo, NFStitle is the game intro

going into the next call tells us there's a flag thats needed to be unset to allow the movie to play (this also starts up the network play)

after debugging a bit, this flag is set during the arguments parsing

if the game is started using -PatchRestart, the flag is set

looking at the parsing a little more reveals that there must be at least 1 argument set for the game to start

the only other argument is -D3D%d

I tried starting the game using -D3D9
and there it is, the title screen and logo all back, some of the game graphics options open up too

now onto the second problem, removing the need to insert the cd
the cd checks are simple to bypass
but after trying to start the game, we are greeted with some sound files not found message

debugging a bit, the sound files paths are overridden for some file types, located here:
HKLM\Software\Electronic Arts\Need For Speed High Stakes\1.0 SrcDrive

change the path to whatever your installation path is, copy over the sound and movie files, and the game starts perfectly without the need to mount an iso

here's the diffs if you need them
F7324 75 > EB
F737C 75 > EB
104045 74CC > 9090

have fun playing this old classic