If you don't already have Half-Life, you need to go buy and install it in order to play Team Fortress Classic. As this is not a Half-Life guide, we are just going to cover installing the Half-Life patch that includes TFC. For Half-Life specific information, visit Planet Half-Life. There are two ways to upgrade your copy of HL. You can down load the patch and install it your self or you can do it through the Sierra Utilities. We will cover the Sierra Utilities install first.
Installing the patch with Sierra Utilities
It is worth mentioning that you should always down load the most recent drivers for your video and sound cards before upgrading with any of the various patches that come out with any game. Many patches take advantage of the most recent drivers supplied by the various hardware manufacturers. You can find a list of the url's for hardware vendors in your SIERRA/Half-Life/valve/media/DrvPage/default.htm folder.
First off, you have to have the Sierra Utilities installed in order to use them. I believe it may have been an option when you installed HL. If it was an option, and you didn't install them, you have to do that now. You can access the Sierra utilities in two different ways. If you are running Windows, it places a Sierra utilities icon in the top of your start menu. You can click on that and it will launch Sierra utilities. You can also start HL, select the configuration option, and select update from there.
Open the Sierra Utilities program, Select the Auto update option. The first screen searches for installed Sierra products. I only have HL from Sierra myself, so that is all it finds. Actually it finds the Sierra Utility program as well. Now you can select which product you want to check for updates, in this case, make sure there is a check mark next to Half-life. Click next and a list of choices you made to check for upgrades appears. You have to be connected to the internet. Click on the start button and it will check to see if there are updates availible. It will check for what version you have installed and then down load the appropriate patch.
You don't have to go looking for it your self this way. The Sierra Utility does it for you, a nice feature. So the Utility will down load and install whatever patch you need. This should work just fine, but occasionally you run into a few problems. Some of these problems may be covered in the Trouble shooting section below.
Installing the patch by down loading it yourself
If you are a do it your selfer, you may want to just down load and install the Half-Life patch your self. The only thing is you need to know what version of Half-Life you have installed in order to know which patch to down load. If you have never updated Half-Life before, then you have version 1.0.0.5. If you look in your SIERRA/Half-Life/sierra.inf file, it will tell you what version you have as well as what patch version (if any) you have installed. To avoid this information getting outdated as new patches are released,
once you know what version of Half-Life you have, hit the TFC Files Page here on
PF.
Now that you have the patch you need, simply click on it to install the TFC upgrade. If you try to install the wrong patch over the incorrect version, you will have problems, so try to be certain of what version you have to start with and the proper patch to down load. Some of the problems that may arise will be covered in the Trouble shooting section.
This little dodaddy has become a full blown section at PlanetFortress, TF Tech. A simple idea, readers can send in their tweaking or performance questions, and have them answered by our competent crew as soon as possible, the answers are posted in a FAQ format to benefit those who may come along with the same problem. A must visit for your TroubleShooting needs. Also if you are looking for more help, and you want it right now check out the forums. Once there you can check out the Tech Support section, here you can post questions and get answers from other game players.
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