NFS: Most Wanted complains that D3DX9_26.DLL is missing

I am struggling to play NFS: Most Wanted on my laptop. It has windows 7 and DirectX 11. But when I start NFS it says that D3DX9_26.DLL is missing.

I used to play this game on my PC which had Windows XP. I just copied the NFS game from there.

One solution I found on googling is, download the missing file and keep it in system folder and it will work. But is this the only solution? Why can't NFS work with the DirectX11 dll? I have d3dx9_32.dll and D3DX9_41.dll in my system32 directory.

Solution 1:

You have to install DirectX 9, which you can get from this page from Microsoft. Windows 7 doesn't have DirectX 9 installed by default anymore.

The major versions (and even sometimes the minor version) of DirectX are so different that a game that expects a certain DirectX version won't work with other ones.

Usually a game installs the version it needs, you also might want to check if it gave you the option to install DirectX during the game installation. You always want to do that, even if you already have DirectX installed, that will ensure that you have a version the game expects.

You also shouldn't just copy games from different computers, always use the installation routine. You're missing registry entries and other software the game needs that aren't in the game directory. Just copying a game fails very often to work, as you have seen now.