The most common question emailed into the team is: How the hell did you record those demos? Battlefield doesn't have demoing does it?

The answer is: No. Battlefield doesn't allow you to record demos natively, which is really a shame. If there's one game that really needs demos, it's 1942, and I'm really surprised that they've never patched it in in all this time. Demos are important, both as a record of a match, (Nice to review it after and see what went wrong and right.) or even just to make up a series of cool little videos (Ex. Northern Brigade's stuff.) They're also excellent as a training tool. It's sometimes hard to explain how to do a certain run, how you want your initial breakout to go etc, and it's very handy to be able to make a little video that your teammates can download and go over. Anyhows, you're not here to listen to me babel, you want to make your own demos.

Get another computer with a capture card. So far this is the only way I found that works. 1942 uses so much CPU and RAM that you really can't capture on the machine you're playing on. I've tried this a few times, and I always lag in the game and drop frames in the recording, which looks horrible. My current gaming rig has an ATI 9800 Pro with Svideo out. It should work with any card with decent video out, it also worked well with my MSI Geforce 4ti4200, but I had to enable the video out every time I wanted to record. With the ATI, it seems to stay on all the time once you enable it. The Svideo out cable runs over to an older used Dell Precision Pentium 3-933mhz I picked up for around $250 CDN, and into an MSI TV@Anywhere Master video capture card. I have a splitter on the audio out on my gaming rig, that goes into the aux in on the capture box, so that I get the audio portion of the game and my Teamspeak chatter as well. The only audio problem with doing it this way is that you can't hear yourself talking, but you do get the in game sounds and everyone else. It's possibly to capture the sound separately with Teamspeak, and sync it all up later, but that's a bit of a pain, and more work is bad.

Basically all I have to do is fire up the recording system, open the MSI software and hit the record button. Done. Note that you'll want to run Windows 2000 or XP on your recording box, as it allows larger files. Most recording software will split the files when they reach their maximum size. (2 gigs under Win9x, 4 gigs under NTFS) An average match will result in between 4-6 gigs of video files, so make sure you've got lots of hard drive space before you start.

As for the system, anything above 800mhz with 256 meg of RAM seems to work fine. You might want 512 megs with XP. I tried recording with a lesser computer (550 Xeon) a while back, and it dropped quite a few frames when the software started to bog out when recording.

Editing was accomplished with Cyberlink's Power Director 3. I messed around with Adobe Premier, and other than the fact that it's 10x the cost of PD ($1000 for Premier as opposed to $100 for PD!) I found Premier to have a much higher learning curve. I'm sure it's really powerful, but for this application it's much more complicated than is needed, in my opinion. You can download a 30 day trial of the software here.

So there you go! If you have any questions or comments, you can email me here. Or contact me via ICQ: #12419781 or MSN: marauder@fragtopia.com.