Battlefield 1942

How to play a 15-year-old, genre-defining game

In 2002, this title became the first of a long and successful Battlefield franchise. The Desert Combat mod rose in popularity the following year during the 2003 invasion of Iraq by Coalition forces and eventually became the basis for the second game in the series: Battlefield 2.

In 2012, on its ten year anniversary, EA made the game free-to-play. Some time after that they stopped distributing the game altogether. Over the years as gaming hardware has advanced, the original game binaries no longer work without various patches. As of the time of writing, the following steps will get this abandonware working on your modern hardware.

1. Install Game

Use Disk 1, 2 (and 4 if you want ye olde PunkBuster). I assume that you have disks. If there is a (legal) source for getting copies of the original game, please let me know.

2. Install patch 1.6.19

This patch can be downloaded from http://www.moddb.com/games/battlefield-1942/downloads/battlefield-1942-v16-patch (md5: 289F225A298FBF39E94F7C0CCB7B0ED1)

3. Install patch 1.61b

This patch can be downloaded from http://www.moddb.com/games/battlefield-1942/downloads/battlefield-1942-v161-patch (md5: 289F225A298FBF39E94F7C0CCB7B0ED1)

4. Install Gamespy patch 1.61

This patch accounts for the fact that gamespy no longer performs match making services for online play. Without this patch, the came exists immediately on startup. Download from http://team-simple.org/download/ (md5: D67068B765CB5B72514D5663BE13E6BA)

5. Install DesertCombat 0.7

This patch can be downloaded from http://www.moddb.com/mods/desert-combat/downloads/desert-combat-07 (md5: 632B5D7E6A4B8D6BA0BCAEB80E883D1D)