This is a guide I wrote a little while ago about installing EF2000 and patching it for 3dfx and running it with EF2000 Reloaded (a custom DOSBox build). This is all done with a single Windows 10 machine, no need for a second retro pc.
This guide was on the COMBATSIM forums, but these have sadly disappeared so I've added it here. It's quite an old guide and uses older versions of PCem, so with later versions it is a bit easier. At some point soon I should really update this guide.
So here it is, my guide to installing, patching and running EF2000 with a single Windows 10 machine...
Overview
We’re going to do a completely clean install of EF2000, Tactcom and the GFX+ patch on a Windows 10 box without the need to dual boot or use another physical machine. We’ll do this by creating a virtual Windows 95 installation machine, then we’ll move our newly installed and patched EF2000 into Windows 10 before final tweaking and configuration with the Reloaded application.
Now this is quite a long and involved process, as we’ll need to install PCem a PC emulator and setup a Windows 95 virtual machine. PCem more accurately emulates the hardware of an older generation of PC’s. This accurate emulation was key in successfully patching EF2000.
Setting Up PCem and Windows 95
The version of PCem I used was v12 available here:
Currently the latest version is v13.1 but I haven’t tried this one yet.
Rather than describe the setup of PCem, I’ll instead point you to the impressively comprehensive tutorial provided by THEOLIGOPOLIST here:
You don’t need to follow the complete tutorial, once you have setup Windows 95 you can leave it there, we won’t need the 3DFX drivers, as we will use this box to create our patched installation but not for running EF2000.
In order to install into PCem we’ll need to quickly cover how to mount cd’s and cd images for use with PCem.
Physical cd
PCem can use the host’s cd drive so for those with physical cd’s you can use them normally. Select the CD-ROM menu option and then the Host CD/DVD option.
ISO cd images
PCem supports iso cd images and you just need to select the iso option within the same settings menu above and then pick your iso image to mount it.
Other cd images
Now for those with cd images other than iso things are a bit more involved, at the time of writing PCem only supports iso images, so if you have cd images in other formats they’ll need to be converted to iso.
One method is to use an imaging mounting utility, such as WinCDEmu available here:
This will mount the cd and give it a suitable drive letter. Once mounted another utility ISOcreator, can be used to create the iso image. ISOcreator can be found here:
Once there is an iso image, it can be used with PCem as described earlier.
Installing EF2000
Mount the EF2000 cd in PCem.
Open up a dos prompt in Windows 95 and select a full install to hard disk, this will automatically install it to c:\Ef2000
Installing Tactcom
Mount the physical cd or an iso image of Tactcom in PCem.
Once an iso image is created, mount this in PCem.
Open up a dos prompt and run the tactcom executable, this will automatically find the c:\EF2000 installation directory and apply the tactcom update.
Installing GFX+
The GFX+ patch can be found here (and a right pain it was to find):
The patch should be unzipped, the resulting tactpat.exe executable should be placed in a folder and an iso image created with this folder added.
Mount the iso image in pcem.
Copy the tactpat.exe executable to the installation folder c:\Ef2000
Run tactpat.exe from windows in PCem, it’s a 32bit windows executable.
Choose the 3DFX option.
The upgrade occurs in two phases a dos window will appear and it will patch ef2000.
Once finished close this dos window and another should open and it should patch tactcom. Once complete close the dos window and exit the Tactcom Upgrade.
Extracting EF2000 from PCem
Now the EF2000 installation folder needs to be extracted from PCEM. Unfortunately at present PCem only uses virtual hard disks in the img format, if it use the vhd format we could have mounted the hard disk in Windows 10 and just copied the folder elsewhere.
Another utility is needed to open the virtual hard disk. One such utility is WinImage. WinImage 9.0 works with Windows 10 and is available here (wima6490.zip):
Shutdown PCem otherwise the virtual hard disk can’t be opened.
Start WinImage and select the virtual hard disk used by PCem.
Select the only partition available
Right click on the c:\ef21000 folder and select extract.
Pick a folder to extract to, ensure ‘Extract with pathname’ is selected.
And that is a fully patched EF2000 installation folder in Windows 10.
EF2000 Reloaded
All that remains is to import the ef2000 folder into the reloaded application. Might be worth making a copy of the ef2000 folder (you don’t want to go through all that again!)
There may be some invalid entries in the clump_3.txt file but once these are removed it should be fine.
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