It’s hard to believe that it has been nearly two decades since the release of the epic video game Beach Head 2002 or Beachhead 2002. If you remember those days, this game are installed in most computer shops or shared among friends via USB drive.
Beach Head 2002 is a war game in which the player controls the defenses in a bunker in a beach head to hold off any enemy assault, which can consist of infantry, armored personnel carriers, tanks and even jet planes. It has a level stages where the difficulty will be much harder as you reach higher level – which unlocks the mentioned enemies. The player has a variety of weapons and defensive mechanisms at their disposal to help them survive the onslaught.
The game was released in 2002 by the developer Digital Fusion and was very popular at the time. Despite its age, Beach Head 2002 is still an incredibly fun game to play. The gameplay is fast-paced and intense, and the graphics (while dated by today’s standards) are still impressive.
How to play it on Modern PC
The game are still available online on Steam for PHP 99, but it is not playable on Windows 10 or 11 at this time and once you’ve played it, you’ll received an error message saying “Error, can’t set graphics mode”.
In order to play classic Fullscreen games on a modern computer, you need a 3rd party program that converts old games’ graphics API technology into Direct3D 11 or Direct32 12, like the dgVooDoo that are known utility tool on modding community, it was developed by a named “Dege”.
If you are tech-savvy enough and wanna really try the game for the sake of nostalgia, you can check our guide below on how to play it. First, you must purchase a license of the game on Steam at https://store.steampowered.com/app/511660/Beachhead_2002/.
For the graphics card wrapper, you can download dgVooDoo from Github. But we highly recommend you download the older version v2.54. The latest version is flagged by Microsoft Defender that is often false positive and not yet whitelisted.
You can download the dgVooDoo here:
- dgVoodoo2_54.zip (816 KB) – https://github.com/dege-diosg/dgVoodoo2/releases/tag/v2.54
Once you have a license and the dgVooDoo, install the game on Steam. Then at your Steam Library, find Beachhead 2002 and right click on it then Properties > Local Files > and click “the Browse…” button.
Now, copy all the files of the game installation and paste it on another directory. For example (G:/OldGames/BH2002). This is important to remove monitor flickering when opening the game.
Then, at the dgVoodoo2_54 zipped files. Just copy the file dgVooDooCpl.exe to your new folder (eg. G:/OldGames/BH2002).
Then open the folder MS on the dgVoodoo2_54 zipped file and copy the 3 DLL files (D3D8.dll, D3Dlmm.dll and DDraw.dll) to your new folder (eg. G:/OldGames/BH2002).
To make sure that the game will not flicker once you switch to play mode, you also need make a copy of the 3 DLL files (D3D8.dll, D3Dlmm.dll and DDraw.dll) and paste it inside the folder BH2Game (eg. G:/OldGames/BH2002/BH2Game).
Your file structure should look similar below.
Once everything is set, the last thing we need to do is to change the graphics settings of our game. Open the dgVoodooCpl.exe, then at the DirectX tab, edit the following:
- Resolution: 1920×1080 (or your monitor’s resolution)
- dgVoodoo Watermark: Uncheck
- Optional:
- VRAM: 1024 MB (lower it depending on your graphics card memory)
- Filtering: Force point sampled (this will allow you to have pixelated texture bringing the original graphics for nostalgia)
- Bilinear blit stretch: Checked (fixed some 3D glitches)
- Antialiasing (MSAA): 2x (Remove jagging edges on 3D objects)
Once done, hit the Apply button. You’re ready to go and play BH2002 like just before but now on modern PC.
Beach Head 2002 is not only one of the best games of all time, but it also holds a special place in many gamers’ hearts. Despite its unplayability on modern computers and the lack of support from the developer, we still recommend checking it out (If you know how to do it). Who knows, maybe they’ll do something about it in the future.