IW4x Manual Install (When the Launcher Fails)

IW4x Client Support
1

As stated previously, in many other posts, you MUST buy the game on Steam. You can access the Store page with this link: Call of Duty®: Modern Warfare® 2 (2009) on Steam

WINDOWS

You may need to run Modern Warfare 2 at least once on Steam to make sure game dependencies like DirectX and the correct C++ Redistributables are installed on your system. If you don’t do that, you may need to install those manually and without them, IW4x will not work!

You can attempt to use these links to install the dependencies manually, if Microsoft breaks them you should Google them and download them from an official Microsoft website.

LINUX (or other OS with WINE)

If you install WINE on your Linux OS it should be able to open IW4x right away provided you follow the steps below to install our client. No extra dependencies should be required.

  1. LOCATE YOUR GAME DIR
    The game folder is where your game files are.
    For example, this is what a game folder may look like in File Explorer: “D:\Steam\steamapps\common\Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2”
Finding your game folder on Steam
  • Find the game in your Steam library, right-click it and select “Properties”
    Right click -> Properties
  • On the left side select “Installed Files” and click “Browse” in the top right, your game folder should now open
    Installed files -> Browse
    Installed files -> Browse821×296 25.7 KB
  1. DOWNLOAD THE IW4x CLIENT
    Next, you will need to download the IW4x client DLL from the official GitHub. As a user, you only need to download the iw4x.dll file. Locate iw4x.dll in your Downloads folder and place it in the “game dir” you found in the previous step.
  1. DOWNLOAD THE IW4x RAWFILES
    Next, you will need to download the IW4x raw files from the official GitHub. Locate release.zip in your Downloads folder and unzip its contents in the “game dir”. If you are on Windows you can do that by opening the zip file with File Explorer and simply dragging the contents of the zip in your “game dir”. You may also use 7-Zip or WinRAR.

You are done!
If you followed all the steps correctly, you should have iw4x.dll and iw4x.exe in the same folder next to other game files such as iw4mp.exe

To launch IW4x you need to double-click iw4x.exe.

DO NOT ATTEMPT TO OPEN iw4mp.exe OR iw4sp.exe. The last two executables will not launch IW4x; they will open the Steam version of the game which is not what you want. It’s vulnerable to remote crashes!