Battlefield 1942 on winex3

HowTo

v1.02 07May 2003

1) Introduction

This guide aims to provide (semi-)comprehensive instructions for the successful installation of EA Games' Battlefield 1942 on winex3 (pay version).

This guide will (initally at least) simply pull together existing information.

This would be better hosted as part of the official Transgaming FAQ, and might end up there if I can find a way to do it...

I'll improve this guide as new info becomes available

Please send feedback/additions/corrections to mailto: bf_1942 AT markzsmith.plus.com

Thanks to TG forum user Less for the some of the best tips.

2) Prerequisites

Before tackling a BF1942 install, you need to have the following:

• A decent video card, with proven accelerated drivers - this has nothing to do with BF1942, it makes sense to try and get your accelerated video/XFree86 installation working and stable before tackling anything to do with BF1942. At least check you're getting decent frame rates from glxgears
• Battlefield 1942 media
• Game patch v1.3.1 (the actual name of the file seems to differ between download sites)
• A no-cd crack (this isn't mandatory, but it makes sense to remove access to copy-protected cd's from the equation, given the other problems that can occur). Make sure you get a no-cd crack for v1.3.1

See section 5 for more on nocd-vs-multiplayer issues

• winex3 official (pay) release 3.0 (not tried on the pre-release)

NOTE: Don't confuse a faulty winex3 installation with bf1942 problems - try and get something simple working under winex3 first, before tackling the bf1942 monster.

NOTE 2: I had a hunch that the more stable and proven Nvidia drivers might be making the difference between success and failure, but there does seem to be a growing number of people getting a working install with ATi cards and drivers, so this hunch seems wrong. It's still vital to make sure your hardware-accelerated drivers are 100% working BEFORE starting on BF1942.

3) Installation

• Mount the first cd, DON'T change directory into the cdrom filesystem, start the install with something like "winex3 /cdrom/setup.exe" - you can't eject the first cd if you do a "cd /cdrom; winex3 setup.exe"
• Install the game as normal; chang of CD's happens about 75% of the way thru
• The installer might have a few partially obscured radio buttons (like "Open Readme") but these shouldn't effect the install
• Exit the install when done, start the 1.3.1 patch with "winex3 [patch_131_name.exe]". I had trouble with the patch, it kept crashing - surprisingly tho, I reran it a couple of times and it worked in the end, odd...
• Apply the no-cd crack. The one I used was a zipfile containing files to copy into the bf1942 game directory, overwriting existing one (also see section 5 for info on online play).
• In my .transgaming/config file, I had 2 occurences of the ClipSpaceFix parameter, one under a generic section and one under the bf1942 game section - I had to set BOTH to N to avoid the known men-with-no-bodies bug in the game.
• It seems as tho the movies that play on the intro can cause problems, you can skip them by hitting ESC (and probably other keys) just as they start. You can also use "+restart 1" as a cmdline parameter.
• Test the game by cd'ing into the install location (eg "cd /games/winex_games/bf_1942") and start it with "winex3 bf1942.exe", this is the moment of truth!.
• Apparently the Desert Combat mod does work (thanks cholzsc1) - I'll add a bit more here when I've tested it.
• Not sure if the Road to Rome expansion works or not - I'll add a bit more here when I've tested it. Since this seems to be primarily a multi-player add-on, online play will need to work for it to be much good!
• Official game patch 1.4.0 is due for release shortly - I have no idea yet if this will work or not.

4) Troubleshooting

• Performance is a major problem for some users, quantify yours by bringing up the conole (using the backtick char, top left of the keyboard) and issuing console.showFPS 1. This draws frame rates and stuff in the top left of the screen during the game.

If it's any consolation to those with performance woes, the EA Games official BF1942 forum has plenty of people with similar windows-based woes...

• Try different graphics settings - don't nesseccarily expect the MAX settings to work! My setup crawls with all settings on max, but is fine with settings a little down from the top.
• It has been reported that enabling some or all of "Environment Mapping", "Lightmaps" or "Shadows" causes crashes (I can confirm this with all of these turned on, but I haven't tried each individually) - this might be dependant on machine config. If the game starts okay but crashes when start a level, try switching these off.
• CD still accessing? Perhaps the no-cd crack didn't work or didn't apply correctly (the one I used tried to put files in the wrong place, meaning the game still looked for the CD)
• About 20% of the time - on my system - when I finish a level and return to the main menu or am taken there between campaign levels, the screen is corrupted and stays actively corrupt even if I start a new level - I can fix this by cycling through the XFree resolution (using ctrl+alt+kp_plus) back to the required one (so I'm back in full-screen mode), whilst still on the menu screen. This might just be a quirk of my hardware/config.

5) Known problems

• In-game characters have no bodies. Change all occurences of ClipSpaceFix to N in your winex3 config file (this is described in the official FAQ)..
• Use of "Environment Mapping", "Lightmaps" or "Shadows" video options might causes crashes
• Point2Play. Nice idea, doesn't seem to work properly on my distro, I start all my games from the cmd line anyway. There's a revised version out now, this might be better than the original.
• Memory usage. I start BF from within Kde 3.0, I originally had only 256mb of ram and the whole thing really struggled - adding more improved this quite a bit. Some postings in the forum suggesting ways of cutting memory usage (like with a bare window-manager) seem to have helped some people with performance probelsm - this suggests that memory usage might be an issue.
• Crap fonts. Some of the menus and config screens are fine on my setup but others have barely-readable fonts. It's a bit of a pain but you couldn't really say it effects the gameplay.
• Online play:

There's some question-marks over online play, although some people seem to have success with configs slightly different to mine.

The server-browser works for me, and I can get various lists of different servers no probs.

When I try and connect to any non-password (and non-mod, non-custom) server I get Invalid CD Key, since I'm running a no-cd crack, I wonder if this bypasses key related processing as well as for cd-access - this seems the most likely reason for the message, and may be a bit of a drawback with a no-cd cracked installation!

I reckon that it can't be that hard to make a no-cd crack that ditches the nasty CD access but still retains the cd key to allow network play, perhaps this already exists?

In a recent posting Less confirmed that it's possible to get a working install without a no-cd crack - this might be the best direction if you need online play

• The demo version of the game doesn't work (based on early version of game).

6) Success stories

I've got a pretty stable, fast setup with the following:

7) Links

• TG game forum - http://www.transgaming.com/postlist.php?forum=636
• TG official game FAQ - http://www.transgaming.com/gamefaq.php?gameid=632
• Game homepage (get 1.3.1 patch here) - http://www.eagames.com/official/battlefield1942/home.jsp
• No-cd crack (posted to forum by cholzsc1) - http://dl.gamecopyworld.com/dl.cgi?Bf1942_ENGv1.31_NoCD-DM-!rar

8) Screenshots