Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 - Retail PC Steam Install from disc (DVD) fix

Image nicked off google images :)

Yes... Call of Duty. 

I guess that I should explain myself for this one a little, rather than diving straight into the fix, or at least what worked for me, other people have other issues (eg installer getting stuck after disc one);

I suddenly got the urge to play through the Call of Duty: MW3 single player campaign again, as I'd not even looked at the game since I got it and initially played through it, at the time I wasn't impressed with the multiplayer so the game was quickly uninstalled. But that's not where the issue is, the uninstall went fine, as has been the case since the game's retail release, the installation has and still is an issue. Now you may say, "dude just download it via steam, don't even bother with the DVDs" that's all well and good, if you have a decent internet connection, which I do not due to where I live, it would have taken me a very long time to download 14GB just to play the short single player campaign, it'd be much better solution for me to install from the disk and download the 300mb in updates.

My Issue was as follows, Trying to install from DVD the installer would launch steam and get to the point where it's supposed to start copying the data from the DVDs and just stall at 0% 0kb etc. no further activity, and that's the same problem I had way back when I got the game on release (my first and only (so far) midnight launch), being that far back I'd forgotten what I done to fix it back then so after much googling and trawling of dated forum posts I found the following thread and used the info to get my game installed!

https://community.callofduty.com/thread/200817251

The specific post that helped:

 
Ok I have had 3 people try it worked for one and not the other two so it is a hit and miss solution.

once I got it installed it reckons I still have to do 14GB update for multiplayer. A friend is telling me it dosnt turn out being full 14gb but I don't have the bandwidth to attempt just yet.

I will post below what I have done but it may not work for all.

......................................
To start go into steam whilst online and go to games library.

If you have already activated the game it should be in there even though you have not installed it.

Now here was my trick start to download game, and install via steam.

Only do about 8mb but then hit pause I did about 8mb to be safe once paused exit steam completely.

This means going into task manager to make sure it is not running in the background.


Now create a short cut to steam on your desktop.

Once that is done right click on short cut and go to properties.

Your target file should look like this providing you have installed steam to your c: drive ( "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Steam.exe" )

What you need to do from here is add -install d: to the end so it looks like this "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Steam.exe" -install d:

"Important"
If your CD/DVD drive is not D: and its E: or G: or something else just replace the d: for whatever drive letter your CD is in.

That part sets it to install from CD not on-line once double clicked on.

When you double click on short cut now it should start the game menu from CD as normal except this time it will say REINSTALL.
please hit reinstall now not install and see how it goes.
it takes awhile but you should eventually see that it is installing from cd drive now instead of nothing.
.................................................

Please post your results positive and negative and feedback online to this thread to help others with same problem, hopefully this way they can implement a fix for this problem.

Credit: dazzas27

So basically if you are starting from scratch, make sure you go into steam and delete the local content fro Call of Duty MW3, Call of Duty MW3 multiplayer and the dedicated server which should be under tools, just to make sure all the local content is gone.

Start downloading the game via steam, until you have about 8-10MB of data downloaded(I had a little bit more downloaded but it doesn't really matter)

Now pause the download, Exit steam so that it's no longer running.

I'm using windows 7 but this should work for XP / Vista also if you're running them, unsure about 8 / 8.1.

Click the start menu, type in "run" and launch the "Run" program, then type in the command to start steam and install from a disc driv, use whatever drive letter is your disc drive you have the DVD in for me it was F: like so:

So, path to where you have steam installed "E:\Games\Steam\Steam.exe" and then the option "-install F:" which tells steam to install whatever is on the DVD in drive F:

Also note that for some people simply launching the autorun from the DVD and selecting "Reinsatall" works.

You should get something along these lines:

Yours may look a little different as mine is already installed but just follow the instructions as normal.

Once it's installed you'll want to close steam and don't let it update for now as it will try and download the full 14GB even after installing 13.7GB from the discs!

So with steam closed go to the directory where you have steam games library (*path to steam*/steamapps/)  and then delete the corresponding appmanifest files which are under "steamapps", the two (one for single player one for multi) for COD:MW3 are:

appmanifest_42680.acf

appmanifest_42690.acf

Fire up steam again and then click to install game via steam from your list of steam games, like you would if you were just going to install the game over the internet. Steam will now check for files that are already installed which will be our 13.7GB from the DVDs and then download 300mb-sih of updates for the game, if you watch the folders while it's doing this you'll see the "\steamapps\common\Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3" folder go to 0 bytes or at least very low, steam has moved the files to "\steamapps\downloading\42690" while it downloads the updates and then will move it all back to the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 folder.

If everything worked then you should be ready to play. I know this is a pain in the arse, but saved hours in download time and allowed me to play the game! I even played some of the multiplayer I was ranked "11" and then ranked up to 14/15 in a few games. It's still "meh" but fun for a few rounds.

And that's all for now, I hadn't done a post here for a while so decided to put this up, I've a few more to finish up when I get the urge too. But hope this helps someone else.

Star Conflict Linux Arch / Manjaro libcurl openssl FIX

Ok So After a system update and a Star Conflict update (not sure which caused the issue but most likely the system update) on my Manjaro machine Star Conflict decided to stop working, I thought I had fixed this previously by installing the needed libs, but the System update must have undone this and updated my version of libcurl.

Star Conflict needs an older version of libcurl than what is available via Manjaro, Installing and old version via AUR is only a temporary fix as system updates can undo this, so Until this changes eg the developers do something about it the solution is this:

To make a local version of the libcurl.so.4.2.0 in the star conflict directory so that it uses that version and not your system version.

Here is a PKGBUILD file for for the correct libcurl

Download the file:  PKGBUILD

# $Id: PKGBUILD 60263 2011-12-08 19:46:25Z bluewind $
# Maintainer: Florian Pritz 

_pkgbasename=curl
pkgname=lib32-$_pkgbasename
pkgver=7.23.1
pkgrel=1
pkgdesc="An URL retrieval utility and library (32-bit)"
arch=('x86_64')
url="http://curl.haxx.se"
license=('MIT')
depends=('lib32-zlib' 'lib32-openssl' 'bash' 'ca-certificates' 'lib32-libssh2' $_pkgbasename)
makedepends=(gcc-multilib)
options=('!libtool')
source=("http://curl.haxx.se/download/${_pkgbasename}-${pkgver}.tar.bz2")
md5sums=('0296d3196b4bf82c896a869b38dbc5f2')
srcdir=src/

build() {
  export CC="gcc -m32"
  export CXX="g++ -m32"
  export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/lib32/pkgconfig"

  cd ${srcdir}/${_pkgbasename}-${pkgver}

  ./configure \
      --with-random=/dev/urandom \
      --prefix=/usr \
      --mandir=/usr/share/man \
      --disable-dependency-tracking \
      --enable-ipv6 \
      --disable-ldaps \
      --disable-ldap \
      --disable-manual \
      --enable-versioned-symbols \
      --with-ca-bundle=/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt \
      --with-random=/dev/urandom \
      --without-libidn \
      --libdir=/usr/lib32 \
      --enable-threaded-resolver
  make
}

package() {
  cd ${srcdir}/${_pkgbasename}-${pkgver}

  make DESTDIR=${pkgdir} install

  rm -rf "${pkgdir}"/usr/{share,bin}
  #we need curlbuild.h
  find ${pkgdir}/usr/include/curl -type f -not -name curlbuild.h -delete
  #now save it as curlbuild-32.h
  mv ${pkgdir}/usr/include/curl/curlbuild.h ${pkgdir}/usr/include/curl/curlbuild-32.h

  mkdir -p "$pkgdir/usr/share/licenses"
  ln -s $_pkgbasename "$pkgdir/usr/share/licenses/$pkgname"
}

Save that as a text file called "PKGBUILD" and put it into a directory where you can safely build it e.g. /home/username/libcurl or whatever you like, note that it does not like any spaces in the directory path so "/home/username/lib curl" will throw up errors

Anyway, open a terminal in that directory and type "makepkg"

Once that is done you'll have

lib32-curl-7.23.1-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.xz

This is a package that is installable via pacman, but we're not going to install it, we're going to extract

libcurl.so.4.2.0

From this and put it in a folder in the Star Conflict directory and then create a symlink for it.

Navigate to SteamApps/common/star conflict/ and make a folder called "libs"

Copy or move libcurl.so.4.2.0 to that folder

Open a terminal in the star conflict directory and type:

ln -s libs/libcurl.so.4.2.0 libcurl.so.4

To check if Star Conflict finds the lib, in terminal in Star Conflict directory type:

ldd StarConflict

You should get something like this:



[synrgy87@syndesktop star conflict]$ ldd StarConflict 
./StarConflict: /media/ntfs1/SteamLibrary/SteamApps/common/star conflict/libcurl.so.4: no version information available (required by ./StarConflict)
./StarConflict: /media/ntfs1/SteamLibrary/SteamApps/common/star conflict/libcrypto.so.1.0.0: no version information available (required by ./StarConflict)
        linux-gate.so.1 (0xf774a000)
        libfmodevent-4.44.08.so => /media/ntfs1/SteamLibrary/SteamApps/common/star conflict/libfmodevent-4.44.08.so (0xf769b000)
        libfmodex-4.44.08.so => /media/ntfs1/SteamLibrary/SteamApps/common/star conflict/libfmodex-4.44.08.so (0xf7515000)
        libcrypto.so.1.0.0 => /media/ntfs1/SteamLibrary/SteamApps/common/star conflict/libcrypto.so.1.0.0 (0xf731f000)
        libcurl.so.4 => /media/ntfs1/SteamLibrary/SteamApps/common/star conflict/libcurl.so.4 (0xf72b0000)
        libXrandr.so.2 => /usr/lib32/libXrandr.so.2 (0xf725d000)
        libudev.so.0 => /usr/lib32/libudev.so.0 (0xf7246000)
        libsteam_api.so => /media/ntfs1/SteamLibrary/SteamApps/common/star conflict/libsteam_api.so (0xf7236000)
        libSDL2-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib32/libSDL2-2.0.so.0 (0xf7123000)
        libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib32/libX11.so.6 (0xf6feb000)
        libGL.so.1 => /usr/lib32/libGL.so.1 (0xf6f4f000)
        libdl.so.2 => /usr/lib32/libdl.so.2 (0xf6f4a000)
        libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib32/libstdc++.so.6 (0xf6e54000)
        libm.so.6 => /usr/lib32/libm.so.6 (0xf6e08000)
        libgcc_s.so.1 => /usr/lib32/libgcc_s.so.1 (0xf6dec000)
        libpthread.so.0 => /usr/lib32/libpthread.so.0 (0xf6dcf000)
        libc.so.6 => /usr/lib32/libc.so.6 (0xf6c0d000)
        libz.so.1 => /usr/lib32/libz.so.1 (0xf6bf6000)
        libssh2.so.1 => /usr/lib32/libssh2.so.1 (0xf6bc7000)
        libssl.so.1.0.0 => /usr/lib32/libssl.so.1.0.0 (0xf6b58000)
        libXext.so.6 => /usr/lib32/libXext.so.6 (0xf6b44000)
        libXrender.so.1 => /usr/lib32/libXrender.so.1 (0xf6b39000)
        librt.so.1 => /usr/lib32/librt.so.1 (0xf6b30000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xf7729000)
        libxcb.so.1 => /usr/lib32/libxcb.so.1 (0xf6b0a000)
        libatiuki.so.1 => /usr/lib32/libatiuki.so.1 (0xf6aef000)
        libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib32/libXau.so.6 (0xf6aea000)
        libXdmcp.so.6 => /usr/lib32/libXdmcp.so.6 (0xf6ae3000)


No need to worry about the "no version information available" that's fine, the game should now launch and run :) and will always use the local lib for libcurl rather than your system version.

If you are missing any other libs they will show up as (not found) and it may be a good idea to find and install these.

BIOS Update Emachines 320 With HP BIOS ( Old School Gaming PC Build Part 3 )

BIOS UPDATE

This will be classed as Part 3 of my Old School Gaming PC Build, while technically it's more part of Part 2, kind of Part 2.5, but I have decided to give this it's own post, as it may be helpful to others in it's own right.

As in Part 2, I am now using an older emachines 320, with an Intel 810 chipset motherboard, a Cognac+ 115661 Cognac 20000731 Rev. G to be exact.

115661 Cognac 20000731 Rev. G

Why update the BIOS? 

The stock emachines BIOS is old and very locked down, it also lacks support for 512mb of RAM, which is what I would like to upgrade this machine to. There may be other benefits but those are the two main issues I had with the stock BIOS.

But where will I find a BIOS update for such an old machine?

Finding a compatible BIOS update for this board wasn't as hard as I expected, it took some Google time & crawling through various old forum threads, as emachines / acer or whatever the brand currently falls under has no legacy support for these old machines, which is understandable.

As it turns out, there were many variations of this board used by a number of companies, luckily one of said companies were HP who have excellent legacy support for their older products, Including BIOS updates.

Firstly I tried this file:
Cognac BIOS Update Cog_211.exe

But this was not compatible giving a DMI error when attempting to flash.

The File that worked for me was this one:
HP Pavilion Cognac BIOS Update FresnoCognac_307.exe

My stock BIOS was 2.01, BIOS ROM chip labelled: COGN+ 306784 V. 2.01 as seen here:

COGN+ 306784 V. 2.01

As stated there were many variations of this board, some with only 2 PCI slots, others with a CNR slot etc, so a different BIOS file may be needed than the one that worked for me, which is why I listed the other file which didn't work for me. And as always flashing your BIOS can go wrong so do it at your own risk!

In order to flash the new BIOS we need to be in DOS, a simple boot floppy / startup disk will be fine, or if no floppy disks are available then you could easily boot from CD, making a boot CD with the extracted BIOS files and flash tool on it also, the flash program does not like HIMEM so stick with the really basic boot disk

Windows ME start up disk creator puts a load of other crap on the disk which takes up room and is not needed, but if you already have a C: drive then you can leave the new BIOS files in a folder on the C: drive and navigate there once you're in DOS, the readme file and HP website have further instructions.

Successful flash

Now sadly I forgot to take pictures of the original emachines BIOS and boot screen, but the boot screen looked like this:
And now after the BIOS update it looks like this:

So now my emachines 320 is erm.. a HP! But more importantly should now support the full 512mb of ram this board is capable of, although I can't test that until the RAM modules arrive, which should be some time this week, Now after the BIOS update windows booted fine and greeted me with "found new hardware" and done it's thing. Also do not forget to set the time / date, boot options and whatever else you need to in the new BIOS as the old settings will have been wiped out. but it should prompt you to do this on the first reboot after flashing anyway.

I wasn't adventurous enough to attempt to change the boot image to something custom but that may be possible with some form of sorcery and would be pretty cool, but I don't want to risk corrupting the BIOS which = bad times.

So what's next? 

Part 4 of course! and the ordering of a USB 2.0 card, just to make data transfer a lot easier and faster and also provide more USB ports as this only has 2, on in the front and one on the back.

EDIT:

512mb RAM arrived today, 2x256mb PC133 SDRAM popped it in and:

All Recognised and working! Also booted into Windows and it's working nicely. SUCCESS!!!


Build Part 1
Build Part 2

Old School Gaming PC Build Update: Part 2

New Beginnings

This is an old system, It's also and old off the shelf system and not a particularly featured packed one at that, No on board Ethernet or even PCI network card, No AGP slot either.

Initial photos from seller:

So why did I even bother with this system? Two main Reasons:

1. It was cheap, paid the postage for it and that was it.
2. Initially all i wanted was the Power Supply Unit from it.

This was initially meant to be a donor machine for my windows 98 era "Old School Gaming PC", but the PSU in this system is a small form factor ATX PSU so is not mountable in the intended case. It will now become at least one of my old school gaming PCs as it works really well and has no bad capacitors etc, this makes things easier although the other system I was going to use is better spec, It's becoming too much of a pain in the arse to find it a decent power supply, without of course spending what i consider too much money on it, and the specs were overkill for intended purpose anyway.

So, here are the specs:

• Model: emachines 320
• CPU: Intel Celeron 900mhz
• RAM: 128mb PC100 SDRAM
• PSU: 150w ATX
• Hard Drive: Seagate 30GB IDE
• Floppy Disk Drive
• Optical Drive: LG 8x Dual Layer IDE DVD writer (picked this up for £4 locally as was missing an optical drive)
• Motherboard: Intel 810 Cognac+( 115661 Cognac 20000731 Rev. G )
• OS: Windows ME
• Case: Small Tower with front USB and Game/midi Port

What I Plan to Do:

• Fit PCI graphics card which i have a spare ATI Radeon 9000 64mb
• Upgrade RAM from 128mb to 512mb(max supported)
• Update bios to support 512mb of ram
• Fit Sound Card, Have a Soundblaster Audigy card
• Fit USB 2.0 Card
• Add USB network adapter of some kind, unsure on this yet
• Add extra Hard drive / hard drives
• Replace heatsink compound and clean up fans
• Maybe change CPU fan.
• Install windows 98se and Linux
• Considering a CPU upgrade to a 1ghz Pentium III 

As a bonus, this system also has some software preinstalled, including Jazz Jackrabbit 2, which is pretty cool, so i think i'll keep the Windows ME install, + it brings back some nostalgia.

Achieved so far:

• Installed Radeon 9000 64mb PCI graphics card
• Installed Soundblaster Live 5.1 Digital sound card
• Installed LG DVD writer drive
• Ordered 512mb RAM
• Ordered USB 2.0 card
• Cleaned everything up
• Flashed BIOS - Will be seperate post on this. 

I Played some games on it to test things out, and all works great I'm actually surprised the Radeon 9000 and the Soundblaster card still work, the only issue was that the Soundblaster drivers for windows 98se/ME were a pain in the ass to find as the drivers on the creative website do not work, the XP ones may work with 2000/XP but their files for the 98se/ME do not work. If i can i will share a ZIP file with the working drivers (unsure of legality issues)

Soundblaster Live 5.1 Digital SB0220 Drivers

SB0220 Drivers RAR file (15.3MB) Windows 98 / ME / 2000 / XP

For Windows 9x / ME install via Control Panel > System > Device Manager

ATI Radeon 9000 drivers are easily obtained from the amd driver / support website so that was not an issue. Also this card is passive cooled with just a heatsink, no fan so it's nice and quiet, My one concern is heat buildup with this case only having 2 fans (CPU 40mm, and PSU 80mm)especially when I add two more hard drives. 

AMD / ATI drivers

http://support.amd.com/en-us/download 

The system boots nice and quick which is also a bonus, Just need to Tidy things up on the Windows ME side, It is a 30GB drive with only 20GB Available so I assume there is also a restore partition, I may look into either opening that up or doing a complete system restore if possible.

Once the RAM arrives and possibly a new CPU fan I will get to work adding the other HDDs from the old build 2x 40GB drives, mounting them may be tricky as this case was designed for 1 3.5" hard drive.

So Onward to Part 3: The BIOS Update!

Build Part 1 

Steam Client Fix Sound on Flash Videos Linux Arch / Manjaro

Hey hey nice quick fix for anyone having this irritating issue!

This was bugging me for a while, basically under Manjaro I was unable to get sound from the flash videos on the Steam store (within the Steam client) e.g. the preview videos on a game's store page.

Flash player was working elsewhere on the system as were the sounds in games and everywhere else

The Fix:

Arch / Manjaro

A 32bit package needs to be installed from the AUR which enables the 32bit flashplugin that the Steam client uses to output sound via pulse audio, the 64bit version of this package seems to be already installed for me but Steam client needs the 32bit one!

yaourt lib32-libflashsupport-pulse

Or install lib32-libflashsupport-pulse from your favourite AUR enabled package manager.



On other Distributions this package may have a different name or already be pre-installed.

You may need to restart steam, I’m not sure but I did anyway.

Sound in steam client flash videos should now be working, just make sure you click the unmute button!

Hope this helps someone, it was bugging me for a while although not enough to investigate further until today lol. But now I am Happy.

Dino D-Day Coming to Linux (and mac) and Get it Free!

Dino D-day is a source engine, multiplayer FPS game, and PC Gamer / Bundle Stars have it up for grabs in a giveaway

http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/07/02/free-steam-key/

Dino D-Day is set during WWII but well.. The Pesky NAZIs are at it again and this time they've got Dinosaurs! I love the randomness of the concept for this game, but have not yet played it myself but will soon!

So hit it up while you still can, I got mine lastnight after a notification email from bundlestars (site that sells game bundles similar to humblebundle, and owned by the focus media group) I have used them a few times, and all is safe.

The game has been out for a while but is receiving a huge revamp update and will also have DLC available, here is the blog post regarding Linux and (urgh) mac support and the game update:

http://www.dinodday.com/?p=229

and for those who are not feeling very clicky an extract:

The Free Update Itself


Soon, everyone who owns Dino D-Day will get a free update. The update is quite large – a near-total replacement of the old game with a new one. We’ve migrated the entire game to a new branch of the Source engine which will allow us to add Mac and Linux support. Linux Dedicated Server support will be available when the update ships! Huzzah for cheap servers! We are shooting for Mac support to be available when the update ships as well. A Linux build of the game itself will be added as soon as we’re able. There are still some things Valve needs to do to the code base before we can ship Linux.

In addition to all that dry, code-y stuff we’ve done a major visual overhaul. We are still working on it and the list of things we want to do is still fluid but you can expect a major overhaul of the game’s visuals. Dino D-Day’s UI has been totally redone. View models and their animations have been completely redone. Environments, characters, dinosaurs…everything is on the list and we’ll get to as much of it as we can in the time we have left.

So Linux support seems to be just waiting on some code updates / whatever from valve, I assume for the newer source engine fork.

Look forward to playing this game, and hey Free! at least for now so nab it quick!

ET Atari 2600 Urban Legend Now Fact.

This Makes me Happy.

For many reasons, but the case is now finally closed. When I seen the news regarding this after arriving home from celebrating a friends birthday, already in a good mood, this just made my weekend even more. Now it's Monday morning and I have recovered from the weekend's antics

Leaves me full of hope and dreams of what else could be true, and what else is still out there waiting to be recovered or discovered. Hope is a wonderful thing.

1983... Back then how did you fix a massive fuck up? You took it out back, shot it and buried it out in the desert  never to be heard from again, pretending it never happened... Until construction workers dig it up in the future! But some mistakes just never go away, and for Atari they just never recovered. From the start this game was a custom designed recipe for disaster, and i can only assume all parties involved were coked out of their heads, Tony Montana style:

 

So, for years, decades, It was rumoured that there was a "mass grave" of ET Atari 2600 cartridges in a landfill somewhere, and now in 2014, 31 years later not only has the legend been confirmed as true but the actual cartridges complete in their retail packaging have been unearthed at a landfill in New Mexico, after permission was finally granted to excavate the site, an Urban Legend among gamers, even inspiring films, (example below) now laid to rest.

Not going into the back story or details here, just felt this was blog worthy and one of the great gaming mysteries solved, at a humble landfill in New Mexico. Now, how many of these excavated cartridges will find their way onto ebay? Would you buy one, a piece of gaming history?(I wouldn't) only time will tell.