The only patch required is the European Retail patch. iirc it was 192 Mb.
Link:
http://www.shacknews.com/file/7078/boiling-point-road-to-hell-retail-patch-20-eu
That was about a three hour download for me in 2005, on dial-up!
Don't worry with any of the other patches. Believe me!
The bugs in the unpatched version were pretty hilarious, but not game breakers.
The size of the moon was one bug they fixed…no big deal.
You could destroy the police station with crossbow bolts.
The jaguars used to *fly*, and grannies would attack you with grenades.
I played though once unpatched just for the fun of it. Though I would not recommend it to anyone now. After playing modern games, you have to be a die-hard to play unpatched BP. The MAIN problem unpatched was the driving controls. And as driving is such a major part of BP gameplay, it was very unpleasant.
Renegade Storm MOD by ShadowMoses was the only playable MOD I came across. There was talk of another playable mod back in the day but it was incomplete/buggy/not generally released, at least I never got to play it. But Renegade Storm was almost to the same commercial standard as Boiling Point itself, props to Shadowmoses!
Unfortunately most of the magazine reviews at the time were made on the first released/unpatched/buggy version of BP, which lead to the commercial/marketing failure of the game. By the time the European Retail patch was released, the world had already moved on. Except for people like us, eh?
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2007/12/18/fixed-size-of-the-moon/
Another bit of useless trivia from the old days, some fourteen-year-old discovered that the moon in BP was just a series of jpgs, which he replaced with pictures of naked chicks. The thread where he announced this at xenus-hq.net had the most number of views there, by about twenty thousand!
Similar thing happened at the DeepShadows forum where there was a thread titled something like "Topless Babe" on the White Gold board that 50 000 views, whereas most other threads topped out at about 1 000.
< insert smart comment about nudity in video games>