How to setup your own Battle City server

Windows

1 – Hosting a Battle City server on Windows is easy. Download the latest version of the game, then open up “bcserver.exe”.

2 – People need to be able to connect to your server… If your modem is connected directly to your computer, all you need to do is give out your IP address. If your modem is connected to a router, then you will need to follow your routers instructions on how to setup port forwarding (Google it).

3 – When you download Battle City, it’s programmed to connect to the main central server, even if it’s down. So even if you have a server up and running, you will need to re-compile “battlecity.exe” with your IP address (The goal will be to make this process easier in the future. Users should be able to open the game and input any IP address if it fails to connect to the main server. It should not be hard-coded).

NOTE: If you have a server running, you might be able to login without making any changes. Some versions of battlecity.exe will check to see if there is a server running on ‘localhost’ if it fails to connect to the main server. Developers often update the client ip address to ‘localhost’ to play Battle City offline on their machine because it is an excellent way to test changes made to the code.

To compile “battlecity.exe” you need to download the source code and setup your development environment (Read: How to Setup your Development Environment). Then, just hit the compile button.

Linux

The Official Battle City server is hosted on Linux. The main reason is that Linux hosting is less expensive at this time. Also, network speeds, for unknown reasons, have always been faster on the Linux GoDaddy servers vs the Windows Servers.

To host Battle City on linux you will need to install WINE on your server. Then, start the server and you’re good to go. (Setup port forwarding if needed)