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Half-Life 2 1.0

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First post, by silikone

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Due to the nature of the DRM that Half-Life 2 leverages, one cannot simply treat Half-Life 2 like any other legacy game and install it conventionally. The game will forcefully update upon being installed, and this is not a trivial update, especially if one plans on matching it with old equipment.
So, long have I been wondering about how to recreate the experience that some hundreds of thousands shared back in 2004. The obvious solution that springs into mind involves performing a certain nefarious act, but resorting to such methods seems absurd when I have my original optical disc right here.

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Reply 1 of 18, by mrau

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what if you blacklist the target address or substitute it?

Reply 2 of 18, by PhilsComputerLab

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Isn't there a retail version that doesn't do this? One of my viewers helped me out, but it could be a modded version, I'm not sure.

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Reply 3 of 18, by DosFreak

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If your disc does have GCF files then you should be able to extract them and play the game . Assuming the offline switch works in that old build of the game if not then you may have to use revemu or assuming an old ver of steam still works then you may not have to resort to any tricks (except for configuring steam not to update and not to update the game).

The furthest back you can download from Steam for HL2 is 2014.

My Orange Box files are from 2007. I don't see GCF files just .SID files. Unknown if installer extracts GCF from the .SID or not.

Found this info. Haven't verified for myself:

Builds 2187-4044 - Old Engine (Source Engine)
Builds 4295-5135 - New Engine (OrangeBox Engine)
Builds 5298-latest - Steampipe*

Offline switches:
http://steam.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games

Found this:

You can install it from the retail discs via this method. […]
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You can install it from the retail discs via this method.

Log in to Steam and click on Library.
Right-click on the game, select Delete local content, and confirm.
Insert the first disc into your computer.
Close Steam (Steam > Exit).
Press Win + R to open Run
In the Run window type:

"C:\Program Files\Steam\Steam.exe" -install E:
Replace E: with the CD/DVD drive you are installing from if is not correct.
Replace C:\Program Files\Steam if your Steam installation is not in the default location.
Press OK. Steam will launch and ask you to sign in if you do not have your password saved. Your installation should continue from the disc.
It's the official Steam method of installing a game from retail discs that would normally install via Steam, so it works for any game in this category, including many Call of Duty games, most Valve games, and other Steam-enabled games like Civilization 5.

However, note that there have been several patches to Modern Warfare 3 since launch, which you will have to download and install via Steam before you can play the game online.

Playing online is also likely to require a fast internet connection and a decent amount of bandwidth towards your cap, so keep that in mind if want to do anything mulitplayer with it.

Dunno if you can abort before it patches. Mabye pull the cable while it's installing? That's assuming all of the files on the CD are enough to run the game and that it doesn't automatically pull down the latest bits at the start of the install.

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Reply 4 of 18, by silikone

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The GCFs on the disc are encrypted.

Half-Life 2 uses an old generic Windows installer as opposed to the Steam disc installer used since Episode 1.

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Reply 5 of 18, by DosFreak

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Silkone,

Sent you a PM.

HL2 Retail installs Steam and extracts the GCF files from the installer but does not extract the game content from the GCF.

Of course if you load Steam (don't do that in this case) then it will perform the installation of the game by extracting the GCF files. (Mabye. Unknown if it would want to update Steam first, ignore the local gcf files and download the updated files from the internet?)

The file I sent you in the PM will extract the files needed to run the game from the installed GCF files for you automatically without having to use GCFscape or the like.

I put a hl2.cmd file in there with the switch to run the game otherwise you'll get the filesystem_stdio error. (Also a steam emulator is being used renamed to "steam.dll" in the bin directory)

The above was all tested in a blank Windows 10 VM with no internet connectivity.

To test the game on my host system I copied all .gcf files to my steamapps directory and just copied HL2 to a user folder under steamapps.

Oops. Made a typo. Change hl1 in the cmd in the .zip to hl2.

The way the above is operating is that it only extracts the bare minimum to run the game everything else is stored in the GCF files. If you want the full extraction (Recommended unless you are low on disk space) then you'll need to extract all of the files yourself using gcfscape and then copy over steam.dll

As for the Orange Box it looks like nowadays if you go to install the game from the CD using Steam, Steam will just skip pulling from the SID and download directly from Steam. I found a SID extractor so I'm pulling the Orange Box files out now.

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Reply 6 of 18, by silikone

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Looks promising, I will give it a try.
I suppose this emulator can also be made to work with Half-Life/Counter-Strike Anthology, which had support for A3D.

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Reply 7 of 18, by DosFreak

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I've never messed with the multiplayer part of Valve games so not sure how that goes. I do know that the steam emulators have functionality in there to either connect to Valve for multiplayer and risk getting banned or to connect to a 3rd party server. I believe the Steam emulator used for these builds does not have the multiplayer functionality but I could be wrong.

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Reply 8 of 18, by silikone

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Launching it gives me an error of a texture not loading, and opening the renamed GCFs, I can see that some of the files are still encrypted.
This tool says nothing about this. Is this a quirk on this specific release, an English pan-European release on DVD?

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Reply 9 of 18, by FFXIhealer

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Following this topic, because I have a 2003 Athlon XP retro build I want to try to run Half-Life 2 on - should be powerful enough.

AMD Athlon XP 3200+ "Barton" @2.15GHz
Abit KX7-333 @166MHz FSB
2GB DDR-400 @333Mhz
ATI Radeon 9550xt 256MB AGP (4x Mode)
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 PCI
80GB WD HDD
Sony DVD-RW
Windows XP SP3

Steam is fully updated - getting the filesystem_stdio error that DosFreak spoke of earlier. Have not been able to rectify this. Steam also updated HL2 and all the other games to the latest versions from Steam. Am I to understand from this thread that the game engines have been changed and may not even run on my system?

NOTE: I have TWO game boxes, one with the original Half-Life 2, the other is the Orange Box. Between the two, I have Episode 1 & 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal.

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Reply 10 of 18, by DosFreak

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I ran it against the HL2 Retail release by Sierra. CAB files on the DVD are dated 11-26-2004. If you don't want to use the tool (which just extracts the gcf files out of the cab files) then:

Not sure what you're seeing encrypted you can either use the Sierra installer or use 7-zip to extract hl2.cab and then use gcfscape to extract the files from the GCF files unless your DVD is different?

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Reply 11 of 18, by silikone

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DosFreak wrote:

I ran it against the HL2 Retail release by Sierra. CAB files on the DVD are dated 11-26-2004. If you don't want to use the tool (which just extracts the gcf files out of the cab files) then:

Not sure what you're seeing encrypted you can either use the Sierra installer or use 7-zip to extract hl2.cab and then use gcfscape to extract the files from the GCF files unless your DVD is different?

11-26? Intriguing. That's after the release of the game.
The cab files are dated 2004-10-08 on my disc.

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Reply 12 of 18, by DosFreak

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By encryption are you thinking the tool to extract the files from the GCF files isn't working properly?
Can you extract from hl.cab and then use gcfscape on the GCF files?

Yup looks like the cab files were modified. The rest of the files are dated 10-8-2004.

This guy said he could use gcfspace on the files tho:
https://forums.sourceruns.org/index.php?topic … g22981#msg22981

If it turns out that cab files are encrypted and GCFscape doesn't work then you should have everything you need to find the unencrypted version on the Internet.

There's no way you'll be able to connect to Steam and use the orig version of HL2.

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Reply 13 of 18, by silikone

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The GCFs in the cabs, as well as the Steam folder, have files that are greyed out in GCFScape, and the data in said files are garbled.
I also still have a vague reminiscence of Steam spending time on decrypting files before agreeing to launch the game back in the day.

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Reply 14 of 18, by DosFreak

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Makes sense. GCFscape doesn't decrypt only Steam does and I don't think I've seen any tool released to decrypt GCF files but I could be wrong.. Probably someone just replaced the encrypted GCF files on the release I have with the decrypted ones.

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Reply 15 of 18, by DosFreak

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Didn't have any luck with the Orange Box. SID extractor extracted all of the files and the game launches and then crashes,thinking the SID extractor corrupted some files or mabye it was released on the disc as broken and the only fix is updating from Steam.

Tried pheonix and simpack. Simpack just crashes.

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Reply 16 of 18, by dr.zeissler

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The DX9-Techdemo from 2003 looked better than the final version.
I own the orange-box, but I will check out if I can get a HL2 version running on a retro-pc with dx9 without installing steam.

Last edited by dr.zeissler on 2018-03-28, 11:14. Edited 1 time in total.

Retro-Gamer 😀 ...on different machines

Reply 17 of 18, by Kerr Avon

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I've nothing to add on the technical side, but I'd like to say that the Orange Box is a fantastic collection, and it was also real value for money, back when Valve actually made games instead of just making a zillion dollars per nano-second via Steam and in-game transactions.

And if you like Portal, then you really should play Portal 2, which is a superb game, with great puzzles, funny and interesting writing, is surprisingly atmospheric (considering lots of areas don't have much going on), and Stephen Merchant is brilliant as 'Wheatly"!

Half-Life 3, and Portal 3, when we will ever get to play them 😢

Reply 18 of 18, by DosFreak

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After many hours comparing the Orangebox detonation and Retail releases I've found out the following:

The Detonation release is an old version except for HL2 Source 2707.

EP2, Portal and TF2 are broke in Orangebox Retail like due to broken Source 2007 binaries but could be other files

DETONATION RELEASE
Unpack each GCF with GCFSCAPE

ORANGE BOX RETAIL RELEASE
Use Phoenix to unpack
DO NOT UNPACK TO GCF!
EP2, Portal and TF2 broken

HALF-LIFE 2 (Source 2707) (Orangebox Retail and Detonation)
half-life 2 content
half-life 2 game dialog
source engine
source materials
source models
source sounds

HL2 (3264) Detonation
HL2 (3531) Orangebox Retail
half-life 2 content
half-life 2 game dialog
base source engine 2
source materials
source models
source sounds

HALE-LIFE 2 + EPISODE 1 (3264) Detonation
HALE-LIFE 2 + EPISODE 1 (3531) Orangebox
Use same HL2 3264 GCF files
episode 1 shared
half-life 2 episode one

HALF-LIFE 2 EPISODE 2 + PORTAL + TEAMFORTRESS 2 (3300) Orangebox

HL2
episode two content
episode two maps
episode two materials
half-life 2 episode two english
episodic 2007 shared
episode 1 shared
Source 2007 binaries
Source 2007 shared materials
Source 2007 shared models
Source 2007 shared sounds
source materials
source models
source sounds

PORTAL
portal content
portal english

TEAM FORTRESS 2
team fortress 2 client content
team fortress 2 content
team fortress 2 materials

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