MechCommander 2

What works

Basic gameplay

What does not

Fullscreen, videos

Workarounds

What was not tested

Network, longer gameplay

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

DirectX 8.0a included.  Uses Bink (RAD Game Tools) and SafeDisc 2.30.031 copy protection.

This guide will get the game installed and working for single-player with a few non-fatal but annoying error dialogs.  Full-screen does not work - causes errors and it switches back to windowed.  Multiplayer does not work because the game does not detect an Internet connection.

First, be sure libgsm1:i386 is installed on your system.  This is a speech compression library.  It may not be mandatory in single-player games but Wine will complain about it missing.

I recommend that you use a different Wine directory (not the default WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.wine).  If you change it, you need to specify it with every wine command ("WINEPREFIX=/home/user/.wine-mc2 winetricks list-installed" for example) or export it before them (export WINEPREFIX=/home/user/.wine-mc2).  Otherwise the commands will operate on the wrong directory.

On a 64-bit system, WINEARCH=win32 will need to be set.

First, either mount the CD from your CD/DVD drive or mount the image file (ISO) directly (CDEmu, etc.)

Start setup.exe and install the game ("wine …/setup.exe" from a terminal, use winefile, or a desktop file manager if configured to launch *.exe files with wine).

Leave winecfg settings at default.  Add native DirectPlay and DirectSound:

winetricks -q directplay dsound

Start the game from a terminal, disabling the Blade software rasterizer which tends to cause errors and performance problems:
wine ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Microsoft\ Games/MechCommander2/Mc2Rel.exe /gosnoblade

Several error dialogs will pop up before and after the EULA and graphics test.  Click the "Continue" and "Don't Send" buttons until it completes or hangs.  You may have to alt-tab to focus the dialogs to close them.  If hung, close the window and force it to terminate or kill the game process.  It should have created the default configuration files regardless.

Edit "~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Microsoft Games/MechCommander2/options.cfg".  In the "[MechCommander2]" section, set "b FullScreen = FALSE" unless you like the extra error dialogs when it fails to switch to full-screen.  Leave "l Rasterizer = 0" for hardware rasterizer (3 is the Blade software rasterizer).

Start the game with the same command line.

You can try to fix the desktop menu entries to start it properly but I haven't been able to get them to pass the "/gosnoblade" parameter correctly, resulting in Blade being active.  The menu entry files are located in "~/.local/share/applications/wine/Programs/Microsoft Games/MechCommander 2".  These *.desktop files are text files whose format follows the XDG/fdo specification.  The "Exec=" line is the important one.

Alternatively, the *.lnk files could be edited to add the parameters but they are not text files and there are very few editors available.

A third option is to set the *.desktop files to launch a script that launches wine and the game with the parameter.

If the framerate is much lower than you expect, try renaming badcard.csv and vidcard.csv, deleting options.cfg, then start the game again.  This will repeat the graphics test without potentially obsolete compatibility adjustments.  You can also try changing some of the Wine Direct3D settings with regedit or reg.

Error dialogs will pop-up twice during start-up, during every video mode change, and at exit.  Most of these are related to 0x887602eb: D3DERR_SURFACENOTINVIDMEM.  Click "Continue" or "Don't Send" to get through them.  The editor (EditRel.exe) has some of the same problems.

Game spams stdout with "Go Flash" messages from its mouse cursor routine (userinput.cpp in the source code).  Probably a debug routine that wasn't removed before release.

There are no official patches for the game.

201502010 - jhansonxi