It’s easy to argue that the Need for Speed series was at its height during the heady days of Underground and Underground 2, right about the same time as the Fast and Furious franchise was all about cars going fast and less about drifting a Pontiac Fiero in space.
If you’d like to travel back to that time, even in your crappy stock standard vehicle, you should check out the custom NFS Underground 2 minimap being designed by Garage Tinkering. It replicates the iconic circular map from Underground 2, but tracks a real vehicle across UK roads.
Real Need for Speed
It’s not easy to do, or else someone would have created and launched a customised GPS unit way before this. The major roadblock to having this ESP32 microcontroller-based gadget installed in your car is the storage required. The folks at Garage Tinkering have replicated the UK’s road system as a series of 2.5 million map tiles, which take up a whopping 236GB of microSD card storage.
That’s a relatively small price to pay, assuming you’re only looking to cover a small area of the Earth at a time. We shudder to think how much data it would take to cover the entirety of the United States, but a love of Need for Speed probably extends to installing a NAS server in the boot alongside that thumping speaker system.
The ESP32-P4 microcontroller is the heart of this project, paired with a 3.4in 800 x 800px WaveShare display. The truly tricky bit is the software, which took ages to optimise, as well as creating and converting the mapping data. QGIS, a geospatial mapping tool, and a host of relevant (and open) datasets, were used to create the maps that eventually show up in the iconic Need for Speed Underground 2 format.
The minimap project isn’t finished by any means, with the minimap still in the relatively early stages of design. It’ll eventually integrate into a Nissan 350Z (an excellent choice for this one). Should Garage Tinkering ever get around to mass-producing them, there will probably be a market waiting for a custom installation. Or you could just do the work yourself, since the software is open source. It seems awfully work-intensive, though. Better to wait until you can grab your Need for Speed-inspired minimap from a retail shelf, yeah?
