Written and Edited By: MarkEAW

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

MULTIPLE COPIES
Method One | Method Two | Method Three
 

You need at least one good FULL Install of EAW on your drive. Like a manually installed portable version. See my 'Install Help Document' (and 'GOG Patches Help Document' if you use that one) on how to get a clean and new copy on your hard drive.

This section is to show you the methods used to have many copies of the game. Also instructions on how to have several game exe's in a single game folder.

From a modding stand point, one of the beauties of EAW is that it doesn't change the registry files (itself) when it is added (copy and pasted from the CD) so you can add the game as many times as you like in various forms. However, there are normally three methods you can use to have many copies of the EAW game.

Method One:
Most people have multiple EAW folders set-up for different campaigns, add-on combinations or game versions/types. Lets talk about the method of having FULL Installs of each game version you may want to have.

Providing you have enough room on your HDD, but today it shouldn't be a problem (around back in 1998, Hard Drive Space was at a premium and different tools known as 'eaw managers' allowed one copy of the game to be used with many add-ons, switching those add-ons in and out of the game folder. The old popular managers named STAB or Scorpions Enabler/Control Manager where used. Now, if you have multiple copies of separate EAW game folders, it saves mucking around with new installs from the CD, and is quicker and easier to manage than using those old tools.

You can have as many copy's of EAW on your HD as you want, especially when you manually install the game. For an example; You can have two separate folders of each official patched version of the game on your hard drive, a 'dual installation' (or triple, or even more) (patch one game folder to v1.1 and the other to v1.2). Just make sure you name each game folder with a descriptive name, so in the future you know which one is what.  You can have even more, separate game folders of any version or type along side each other.

Method Two:
This information here is optional, and is only here to say that it can be done. You can skip this read if you want to.

This isn't to fix anything, other than to have maybe a complex folder structure of one LARGE primary install of EAW and then have several SMALL secondary installs of EAW the use the LARGE install as a source. This is possible by EAW using a modified Debug Path in the eaw.in file. Example: The primary one can be a FULL install of the standard EAWv1.2, while the secondary folders can be dedicated to theatres (DAW, Ardennes, BOB etc) or other uses for testing something out. Just link back the SMALL installs back to the FULL installation in the eaw.ini file.

To get a SMALL Install, just copy a game folder over and then delete all the .CDF files. (The small installations are only a few MB in size without add-ons of course since they do not need the duplicate cdf files. This is the preferred way for some pilots for installing many EAW game folders and gives a very clean source folder because you never need to add any add-ons to your full installation.

Once linked via the Debug Path, the SMALL Install with reference the FULL install as its source. To set the folder path to your full installation, open your eaw.ini file in the SMALL install folder of EAW and find the Debug Path= line. Add in the full path to your FULL installation of EAW, such as; Debug Path=C:\Microprose Software\European Air War\Full\ That will allow the small game folders to source from the full.

Method Three:
This method is all about having many game exe's with different filenames in the game folder. Normally when running EAW natively on Win2000 or above, you need to have the filename of the game exe as , eaw.exe. With Wrapper Programs it doesn't matter. Since this method requires a wrapper program and is unique,  I put the information in my 'Troubleshoot Wrapper Help Document'.

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