What works

Nothing. the installer tries to launch then crashes.

What does not

Unable to run installer.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Old versions of Wine before 3.03 were not tested.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Intel
• Driver: proprietary

Additional Comments

MP3.1 Instructions

Change shadowmode to 1 in game files root options.ini (otherwise crashes)

Empty wine prefix win32 arch + the three 3 Winetricks

Start the game exe (MW4Merchs) with specific command line options*

If you want videos you will need to play with the ancient native Codec DLLs per Georg Henning

The game has README.TXT in game files about playing behind a typical NAT as client

I am running the game with taskset -c 0-7 on Linux

Winetricks

• 4.15-staging: vcrun2005, d3dx9, directplay
• old: vcrun2005, directx9, directplay
• OSX: may need quartz (?)

Test coverage

When submitting test results, you can use the below as checklist and make sure version 0030c is used

Run (make sure exe CLI options, winetricks, options.ini shadowmode is 1)

MekMatch WAN Multiplayer (make sure you read the legacy requirements of NAT if playing off LAN)

Dedicated server option with -win32dedicated

LAN Multiplayer w/ dedicated server

Controls Keyboard, Mice and Joystick

Fullscreen and/or Windowed (yes fullscreen may have some issues, see George Hennig's results)

Autoconfig (ignore the initial rasterizer error, you should be able to select resolution here)

Videos (try with native DLLs per Georg Hennig's results or run with /gosnovideo)

Commandline Options if you wish - at least note which ones you used

Please note which hardware you are running and what winetricks and DLLs/options were used

MW4Merchs.exe CLI

It is very important to use the right CLI options to ensure it runs today.

I use the below CLI to start: 

taskset -c 0-7 wine ~/mektek/base/MW4Mercs.exe -noautoconfig -32 -window -gl /gosnovideo /gosnodialogs /gosusehw /gosnoblade

Description of CLI (Some copied from Reddit, Credit: u/VolkarTheDestroyer)

-win32dedicated

Starts a dedicated LAN multiplayer server

-32

This forces the game to run in 32 bit. Older games were made before 64 bit came out and will not run properly on a 64 bit system unless you force the game to run in 32 bit.

-window

Some older games will freeze or crash when starting in full screen. Running the game in windowed mode can fix this issue. Once the game starts in a window you should be able to switch to full screen by clicking the square full screen icon in the banner bar.

-f 1024x768

This will start the game in the desired screen resolution. Back in the day when this game was made, allot of people still used CRT monitors with screen resolutions that had a max resolution of 1024x768. This game may have issues with newer monitors and graphics cards that run higher resolutions by default. Other resolutions that this game was designed to run in were 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, and 1280x1024.

-gl

This forces windows to emulate OpenGL architecture when running this game. Allot of Older games used OpenGL and it is required to run. Today there are a lot of alternatives to OpenGL and windows 10 may not run OpenGL by default when running this game.

-GameTime.MaxVariableFps 60

Back when this game was made a lot of systems had a max refresh rate of 60 FPS. Most computers now will run at a minimum of 60 FPS and go much higher. This can cause weird anomalies in this game such as mechs rotating super-fast in the mech lab or the mouse cursor will leave pixel remnants of itself whenever you move it across the screen. If you are having issues with the games FPS not synchronizing with your system, you can lock the games FPS to 60 with this command.

/gosnovideo

This games start up videos use older formats that do not seem to work with newer codecs, causing the game to crash at start up. Use this command to prevent the videos from running or get the native codec DLLs that play the ancient formats per Georg Hennig's test result.

/gosnojoystick

Joystick testing to be done by someone who has the hardware. Windows 10 users report drama with the current driver set.

/gosnohw

Disables the video hardware compatibility check - I think they hardcoded this so good idea to use as option today.

/gosnoblade

-noautoconfig
This command will prevent the Auto Configuration Utility (use to set resolution, ignore the first rasterizer not found error) from running when the game starts, this is helpful if the Auto Configuration Utility runs every time you start the game.