Anyone remember Battlefield 1942? I still have the Secret Weapons demo. I couldn't figure out why for years it wouldn't run. Just so happened to try yesterday, optical drive still connected and it ran. I figured out for some reason it needs an optical drive connected to run, so I just created an empty iso file, right click mount, and bam, it runs.

If anyone wants to play it, you can get it here. https://archive.org/details/Battlefield1942SecretWeaponsOfWwiiDemo\

Virustotal says the zip and exe are clean.

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/345b8c8d51577cc8cc95ee378fe45352bd0966ba6588129ed069fb5a2d5c8734

https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/ffe6db6668cea9caaa0ad25cdb4f7c188c416d229d768533e272d2a50fb76dda

If anyone gets bored... this is all I have left of the BF trilogy. I lost all my game cd's years ago during a move. I lost probably hundreds of hours to that game back in the day.

That sounds like someone has de-fanged the DRM but could not remove it, entirely.
There is little prospect of it being remedied, sadly, unless Gog included it in their catalogue, because they would update it so that it no longer required obsolete technology to run.

^ ^ Precisely my thoughts, only it was someone at Dice who packaged the demo together, did so lazily.

Wow. That's a fun, bizarre discovery. :D

It's a bit before my time, but grinding in first-person shooters is a national pastime.