I've finally found a working solution. I cannot guarantee it will work for everybody, but I've managed to enable the D3D mode on my Radeon 9800 and got the game to work without errors or crashes.
What you will need:
NBA Live 2001 demo - just Google it. There are still some sites where you can download it.
Install the 2001 demo and go to the installation folder (default: c:\Program Files\EA SPORTS\NBA Live 2001 Demo).
Step 1:
Next copy
3DSetup.exe and
3DSetup.dll (
NOT the ini file) to the setup folder of your NBA Live 2000 installation (default: c:\Program Files\EA SPORTS\NBA Live 2000\setup)
Rationale: The newer 3DSetup from Live 2001 should be able to detect your newer graphics hardware. You must leave the 3dsetup.ini file intact, because it tells the 3DSetup where to write the configuration in the windows registry.
Step 2:
Run the 3DSetup from the Live 2000 start menu. Now you should be able to select the appropriate option describing your graphics card.
If you still see only the software renderer, you either did something wrong in Step 1 or even the Live 2001 3DSetup cannot detect your 3D card. In this case you still have the option to edit the configuration in the registry yourself. If you've never used regedit before, I strongly recommend you to get assistance from someone who has good knowledge of the Windows Registry.
Optional step 2A (
Proceed only at your own risk):
Run
regedit.exe and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\EA SPORTS\NBA Live 2000
Change the "Hardware Acceleration" value to 1
Change the "Thrash Driver" value to dx
Again, you won't have to do this if Step 2 worked fine.
Step 3:
Try running the game. If it works fine, you're lucky. More likely you will get an error message reporting some "Unhandled exception" and the game will crash.
In that case copy the
dx7z.dll file from the Live 2001 Demo installation folder to
3rash folder in Live 2000 (default: c:\Program Files\EA SPORTS\NBA Live 2000\3rash).
Rename dx7z.dll to
dx6z.dll and confirm that you want to overwrite the original file.
The procedure in Step 3 is not my original idea and it was reported in this
forum some time ago.
If you followed the described steps correctly, your NBA Live 2000 should now work in D3D mode without major problems.