Thanks for this hint. PCem runs MW2: Titanium also quite fine. I'll give it a try with QEMU.

I said this on the previous MW2 thread, its necroing but its necessary
Mech2 and all of its versions doesnt work on WIn10 for the same reasons of why I76 and Heavg Gear some time ago.

And its the MW2SHELL.DLL
it needs to be hacked and updated to work on modern machines, http://www.zeus-software.com/forum/viewtopic. … hp?p=2305#p2305

If someone here could enter in contact with mech2.org discord group they may still have the source code of the windows 7 patch that zeus used.

Deffnator wrote:

I said this on the previous MW2 thread, its necroing but its necessary Mech2 and all of its versions doesnt work on WIn10 for th […]
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I said this on the previous MW2 thread, its necroing but its necessary
Mech2 and all of its versions doesnt work on WIn10 for the same reasons of why I76 and Heavg Gear some time ago.

And its the MW2SHELL.DLL
it needs to be hacked and updated to work on modern machines, http://www.zeus-software.com/forum/viewtopic. … hp?p=2305#p2305

If someone here could enter in contact with mech2.org discord group they may still have the source code of the windows 7 patch that zeus used.

I wish I knew how to code as I'd do this for the community. Maybe when I retire, if the .dll is not fixed by then, I'll learn and do it.

Emulation can now handle this game pretty well through Win98SE guest environment (DOSBox, QEMU, PCem). This saves the hurdle of hunting down unofficial patches and allow the game to be played on anywhere Windows 10/Linux. The emulation also has the option to run the game at absurd speed 😁

kjliew wrote:

Emulation can now handle this game pretty well through Win98SE guest environment (DOSBox, QEMU, PCem). This saves the hurdle of hunting down unofficial patches and allow the game to be played on anywhere Windows 10/Linux. The emulation also has the option to run the game at absurd speed 😁

Normal people who wants to experience the game 1st hand HATES emulating.
and Setting up an emulated PC for them is a waste of time.

Again, All it needs its the DLL patched for modern kernel like i76 and HG1

Where is the I76 and Hg1 DLL?

Carrera wrote:

Where is the I76 and Hg1 DLL?

HG1 with patch installed is located on a well known abandoned website, as the RIP version. Im not goging to post the link because of the rules, just google it.
it needs only DGvoodoo2 with Glide, GDI Hooking, Stretched, keep aspect ratio force emulate aspect and enable app state.
Even the menus works without black screens thanks to dege's wrapper
I76 works out of the box with the GoG version.

The windows versions of Mech 2
-It freezes after the intro without compatibility
-videos has no sound and the game crashes trying to load a mission(it happens mostly with Titanium and 3dfx, from win7 and below this problem is non existant due to the MW2Shell.dll being updated to work on it)
-All patches including MechProxy Prepaper that added fog translucency and such had their own dll quirk

i was counting with someone closer to me to look at it, since he has contact with one of the devs, but he is occupied with another project atm.

Years ago I remember finding a patch that used Microsoft Detours to fix the BitBlt and other issues. I remember attempting to disassemble the programs to find out what was wrong only to discover that they were packed with a unique format. Fast forward about a decade or two and I was looking at some Java code which would read/write a Windows PE executable. If anyone is interested, I have created a modification to the pecoff4j code which will unpack the exe and dll files. it uses a simple Hoffman encoding scheme to pack the code, data and relocation sections of the PE files. I used this as a means of learning more about Java and 32 bit Windows executables. I have run the output through IDA 7 and it doesn't have any issues with it. The code isn't all that useful as there are no debug symbols present however it should enable people to fix the issues present due to the differences in the Win9x and WinNT API. The Windows Application Compatibility Toolkit also looks to have some promise as there's an entry for Mechwarrior which is supposed to fix the Heap, FileFind and BitBlt issues.

I'm glad there's no securDisc or securRom protection on these. Microsoft removing driver support for those is really unfortunate. It would be nice if they would release the code; like they did for Doom.

Anyway, happy patching.

If anyone here's still interested:
Working. I wrote an installer combined with the fixes.

Re: A comprehensive guide to install and play MechWarrior 2 on new versions on Windows.