So, you're feeling nostalgic and feel like playing the old DayZ. You do everything just like back in 2013 - download ArmA II, ArmA II OA and DayZ Mod. Then you hit the Play button... just to see the error message pop up. Yes. Welcome to new reality: DayZ Mod is 12 years old now, and you're trying to launch it on that new fancy operating system. Feeling old yet?

The reason is update 24H2 that totally killed every end-of-life game that uses BattlEye anti-cheat. ArmA II OA is one of them. If you try to launch it, the game just won't start, instead giving you an error message that says:

'Windows cannot access the specified device, path or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item'

The problem doesn't lie in the game or even BattlEye itself. Just like I've said, the real problem here is the 24H2 update that broke most of the older games that used to run BattlEye. Of course the newer ones were updated, but that's not something to expect to happen for older games just like our favorite ArmA II. From the first glance it seems like that kind of situation you can't help but don't worry, it can be fixed somewhat easily.

Our first step is obviously to install everything, duh.
Download and install ArmA II, ArmA II OA and DayZ Mod. Do not launch any of these yet. Once done, download DZLauncher here.[app.dayzlauncher.com] Install it too, Once done, click on the Mods section and install DayZ 1.9.0 and the mods you want to play: Epoch, Origin, whatever you feel like, just make sure there's a server for it. Once the mod is downloaded, hit the 'Verify' button, otherwise it may not launch.

Now go back to your Steam library. First select ArmA II and click Play. Install everything the game offers and wait until you load up in the menu. Now you've created a profile. You may go to profile settings to customize your player, but that is not neccessary. Now you may close the the game. Then go to ArmA II OA and try to launch it. The game will ask you to install BattlEye, do it and wait for it to start. If the game starts without any problems, continue to the step NUMBER?. If you see the error pop up, continue to the next step.

Let's be fair: if it wasn't for this error, most likely you wouldn't be there. Close the error window and open your Discord. This link[discord.com] will take you to the ArmA Discord. Once there, scroll down the channel tab, search for Other Games and select the #end_of_life_arma channel. Once there, hit Ctrl + F, copy and insert A2OA BattlEye fix for Windows 11 2024H2. You will see message by user Dwarden with a download link to a file named BE_A2OA_v164_2024_Windows11_fix.7z. Download this.

Now you have a .7z archive. It is usually recommended to open it with 7zip, although I'm not sure if you can use WinRAR for that, as for me, I downloaded 7zip just for that. Now open the archive. Inside you'll see 'Arma 2 Operation Arrowhead' folder that contains two files: a BattlEye folder and an ArmA2OA_BE file. Head to your ArmA II Operation Arrowhead directory and drag the folder into the 'common' folder. It will ask you to overwrite the existing files. Agree with it and wait for it to be over.

Done! Now the fix has been installed. Go back to Steam and try launching the game again...

...and see the black screen and your game being unresponsive. Now this is the reason why I made this guide: it's because that was the part I couldn't get past. And no guide I saw ever explained what is this and how to fix it. Being fair, I've tried so much things I couldn't even remember: changing setting in game's .exe files, changing Windows Security settings, trying to launch the game in compability mode, yet nothing seemed to be of any help until I restored everything back to how it was and decided to just let the game run for a while. And that's how I found a solution for ArmA II OA black screen issue. And that is...

TO WAIT. Yes, I just let the game run, not really hoping for much. I left my PC for a few minutes and when I eventually came back I finally saw the game's menu. Ta-dam! And now the game works and ready to run.

Now close the game and open DZLauncher. Select any server of your liking. If everything worked, in DZLauncher you'll see a Play button instead of Download one. Click the button and wait for a few minutes. And that's really it. You're back!

This guide was based on the one reddit user Familiar-Duty9297 provided on r/arma subreddit. Without this guide I would've had a really hard time trying to figure out what is the issue, so you may go and say thanks to him in the thread yourself too. As for me, all I wanted was for people to know how to fix the game because no game should be forgotten like that. I still want people to play it and I know that all those movements with files and stuff can really discourage some players, and that black screen thing makes it no better. The OG DayZ Mod fans, unite! There's not many of us out there anyway.