One of the few reason I dual-boot with windows is so my son can play a few windows games. One of his favorites is BF 1942. He owns the Complete Collection Pack of DVDs (4 games). Anyway, I was googling this game and linux, and it looks like EA (electronic arts) may have a linux version, but I'm not sure. I go to their site and see some linux patches/demos to download. One is a 276MB tar.gz, and another is much smaller.

is this the game, or just a patch?

http://www.ea.com/official/battlefield/1942/us/gamedemo.jsp

does anyone here play BF on linux?

I do not have BF 1942, but in looking at them I would guess that it's an installer for the game, as 276mb is pretty small for that game. I have dial up otherwise I would download it and open the tarball to see for sure. The smaller one may just be a patch. They may be only for servers for multiplayer, I don't know. With Doom 3, I grabbed a linux installer and then needed to get some files from a windows installation of the game, maybe this is similar and if so, it will be in a readme file.

Like you, I basically dual boot for one game, in my case EA sports Madden 2007 (which runs strange for me on cedega + mandyspring or 08 or fedora 7). I think cedga will run BF 1942, but your millage may vary. Madden 2006 and 2005 ran great, so it can be hit or miss. The $15 ($5 x 3month subscription)isn't that much to try, if the file from EA isn't a file to install and run 1942.

I'm new to the "windows games on linux" thing. Last night in mandriva 2008, I browsed to my win2k partition, and right-clicked on a few .exe game files... and selected "open with Wine emulator"... most did not work. I guess there is something more to do, or else I didn't try the right .exe files.

not all of them will work with wine. you can check the application database for compatibility: http://appdb.winehq.org/

there's also Cedega for running games, but thats pay-for.

Hi there, yes there is cedega, http://www.transgaming.com I have used it to play BF1942 in linux for a few years and it works great.

Other games I have installed in Linux via Cedega :-

Battlefield 1942 (also Desert Combat Mod)
Battlefield Vietnam
Battlefield 2
Battlefield 2142
Bejeweled 2
Fish sim 2
GTA San Andreas
GTA Vice City
Tanarus
Medal of Honour
Max Payne 2

You do have to pay a small fee for cedega, but I think it`s worth it because they continually work towards getting games working under Linux, and you can vote for games for them to work on.

Also many games that they dont officially support run just fine with changes to the settings.

Found this the other day. Haven't tried it but it looks interesting.

For some it may be small change, but 5 EUR/month is not that small for me. I buy games when the prices have come down; usually at a price of 10 to 15 EUR a game. This 5 EUR/mo would mean 60 EUR/a to let me play 10 EUR games within Linux when now I can boot to windows and play them there. The price is quite high IMHO.

BTW Max Payne 2 plays almost perfectly on Wine.