HappyPappy Blog

Well after some time off from Battlefield 2 (BF2) I saw my son playing it and decided to try it again. I remember playing BF2, I liked it once.

Let me start by saying that since the last time I played BF2 I purchased a machine that absolutely crushes both the minimum and recommended requirements for BF2. I have more disk than needed, wayyyy faster processor, and much much faster video.

You’d think installing BF2 would be a cake walk yes? Nooooooo, that is in fact not the case. Everything starts smoothly until right after either BF2 Install Disk 1 or BF2 Install Disk 2 (you never know exaclty when it’s gonna happend) when I got the lovely message below:

First thing that occurs to me is naturally “why oh why did installation fail?” followed closely by “WTF do I have to start again from the beginning?” I mean seriously if you’re the retard who coded up the BF2 installation program why not TELL THE USER WHY YOUR STUPID SETUP FAILED!!!

So I go the EAs web site to look for some solutions and get some of the brilliant advice below:

EA’s top solutions to Battlefield 2 setup problems are (in no particular order):

1) Rename the InstallShield folder….yeah there’s a winner
2) General retarded crap….
3) Shuuure….let’s clean out our system TEMP folder…
4) Try manually installing BF2….for the love of crap then why bother doing an install setup at all???? Just provide customers with a #$%@#$%#@ zip file morons

And of course you will always be asked what your computer specs are no matter how much you tell them that your computer is fine…sigh….these suggestions are sooo stupid one hardly know what to do other than cry into your pillow. If they work for you….great…did nothing for me.

After hours of frustration on the EA forums and support I ended up copying files from a good setup on another PC to my new PC (WHICH WAS SETUP USING THE SAME GODDAMM CDs….SO YES THE CDs WERE FINE!!!). One thing that needed to be fixed was that I needed to specify a valid CD key for my NEW installation; luckily EA actually showed a bit of foresite and includes a bf2_code.exe program (located in your bf2 setup/support folder) which you can run independently to setup your CD key.

I fired up BF2 and lo and behold everything not only works fine but I get upwards of 80 fps with full detail turned on (NOT MY HARDWARE YOU POOPS).

Last thing to do was to install the latest BF2 patch so I could go play on some ranked servers but unfortunately EA abilities at deliverying a working setup program come through again. Since I installed the program manually there is no registry entry specifying what folder BF2 is intalled in. I run the 500+ mb patch only to be told that the patch can’t find my BF2 install folder….here’ a thought….if your patch can’t find it….ASK THE USER FOR THE BF2 FOLDER….it’s three line of code (I know I used to write InstallShield setups).

Some more digging on the Internet and I find an obscure reference to a registry entry that specifies the setup folder for BF2; the steps are as follows:

1.Go To Start > Run > Type “regedit” (without quotes)

2. Go to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Electronic Arts\EA Games\Battlefield 2

3. Then right click on the right hand window and go on NEW string value,then enter InstallDir for the string name and for the value enter C:\GAMES\Battlefield 2…or whatever your actual Battlefield 2 folder actually is.

Finally the patch worked and I was able to log on to some ranked servers. Unfortunately by this time I was drained and had lost the desire to play anything. My advice to EA is to use WinZip as their setup program, your customers will be much happier.

Hope this saves you some time, took me about two hours to install a three CD program which then worked absolutely fine (mean to say that the PC was fine!!!#@$@@).