Windows Mode

Windows Mode and Other Helpful Flags

After you’ve been modding for a while, you are going to run into situations where you want to run in windows mode to read error messages or you are going to get tired of having to go through all the steps of manually launching the game and then switching to your mod every time you want to play.

There is a technique to make this easy that simply involves creating shortcuts and setting “flags”. Here’s how to do it:

Windowed Mode:
1. Open your Battlefield 2 folder.
2. Locate the BF2.exe file.
3. Click on it with the right mouse button, and while holding down the button, drag it to your desktop.
4. In the list that comes up, select “Create Shortcuts Here”:

5. After you create the shortcut, Right-Click on it and choose “Properties” from the list that comes up.
6. In the Properties window, find the box labeled “Target”. At the end of the text in that box, add a space and then“+fullscreen 0”. It should look like the following. Note that there is also a space between “+fullscreen” and “0”:

7. Leave everything else at their defaults and click “OK” to close the window.

“+fullscreen 0” is what’s called a “flag”. By adding this flag to the end of the target, we are telling the game not to run fullscreen, which means it will run in windowed mode.

Now whenever you are having problems with the game crashing while it’s loading a map, you can just double-click on this shortcut, and the game will run in windowed mode, which usually will print an error message if it crashes instead of just quiting.

You may also wish to change the name of the shortcut from “Shortcut to BF2.exe” to something that makes more sense like “BF2 Windowed”.