The Half-Life WON Installation and Update Guide

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Installing Half-Life WON
3. Applying the official patches
4. Patching the client to see the WON2 Master List
5. My own conclusion
6. Some notes

Introduction

This guide explains on how to install Half-Life released by Sierra that uses WON as well as Valve's Counter-Strike, Valve's Team Fortress & other minor expansions as well as enabling the client to be able to connect online on computers in the modern age

This is a Windows guide, by the way, not Linux. By the way, please notify me if stuff is wrong here and I'll fix it. Thank you.

The official WON2 website no longer works as intended and all download links are unavailable for download, so this website and guide exists as a way to provide easier sources to download from. All downloads provided on this website is safe and is unmodified from the originals.

Recently, I have noticed that getting resources for Half-Life before the age of Steam is slightly complicated and it involves finding a CD image or a fully installed package that fits your liking, me, however, I like to install everything in their original retail versions and update them to the latest version. With Half-Life, this is a slightly complicated task, so I decided to write a guide in terms of how to go through with this process.

Installing Half-Life WON

Download the proper Half-Life CD rip from either the Web Archive or from our mirror on the website, then mount the installation media either using Daemon or Windows if you're on newer versions. If the installation requires a CD-Key, search the keys on the internet, they're easily available and you can find them in the first results.

• Web Archive Mirror
• SourceFreaks Mirror

After installation, do not start the game yet, we still have more stuff to do with the game installation. Before I continue, the music will not play since the game requires you to have the main, non-burnt legitimate Half-Life CD-ROM inserted into your drive, in our case we don't have an official disk, we just downloaded the game off of the internet and installed it that way so the music will not be present. These following patches that we will be applying are gonna solve most of our issues, even though they will get rid of some features like View-Roll, Bunny-Hop

Applying the official patches

Download all the patches for the game which includes hl1100.exe, csv15full.exe and hl112.exe

• hl1110.exe
• csv15full.exe
• hl1112_final.exe

Upon downloading, run them in the same order as listed in the paragraph.

Patching the client to see the WON2 Master List

To make the game see the servers running today, we need to update the Master Server List since the original WON servers have been shut down for quite some time now. For that, we need to modify a single file in our installation to have an updated list of custom hosted WON servers provided by the WON2 service.

For that, we need to download an archive that contains the modified woncomm.lst and put it into the following folder: "Half-Life install folder\valve\"

• woncomm.lst

However, if you don't feel like downloading this file, you can edit the said woncomm.lst file inside the valve folder using something like Notepad and replace everything in the folder with the following content in the textarea

After doing that, you should be able to play Half-Life online. However, stay vary of what servers you connect to, due to the nature of old software, exploits are found, and as such can possibly brick your software, please make a backup of your hard-drive image before hand or join servers you trust.

My own conclusion

As a person who uses an old computer for the sake of experiencing Windows XP natively, I want to be able to have easy guides for the programs. Half-Life has a special place for a lot of people, and I want people to be able to download things without having to deal with the websites preventing them access due to the things related to something like their location and hopefully allowing the preservation of the files required for this process.

Some notes

• Run the game with "-console" launch parameter to start the game with the Console, this is the only way to open it
• There is a way to disable texture filtering, to do so, go into the main Half-Life installation folder and create autoexec.cfg and write "gl_texturemode gl_nearest"