Sunday, November 11, 2012

Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries

Back in the day...way, way back in the day, Mechwarrior was one of my favorite games. My roommates and I spent hours building out our 'mechs and running missions. So out of nostalgia I picked up a copy of Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries when I saw it a few years ago at Half Price Books.

Unfortunately, while MW2 is rooted firmly in a DOS/Windows 95 world, my PC ran XP2. I made a brief attempt to get it to run in DOSBox but didn't have the proper incantations (or, maybe, DOSBox just couldn't run the game at the time). So I relegated the MW2 box to the (unofficially named) Drawer of Old Games.

Fast forward to a few days ago, and during a minor clean-up session I ran across the Drawer of Old Games. MW2 was sitting there on top, tempting (daring?) me to give it another try.

A quick Google search turned up a DOSBox Mechwarrior2 Wiki page. The following steps are, with slight modifications, taken straight from that page:

  1. Use ImgBurn to rip a copy of the installation CD to a .cue/.img file. (Not an .iso.) 
  2. Start up DOSBox. Mount the C: drive (I have it auto-mounted in ~/dosbox/c in ~/AppData/Local/DOSBox/dosbox-0.74.conf). Mount the .cue with IMGMOUNT D /PATH/TO/MECHWARRIOR2.CUE -t iso.
  3. cd D:\DOS and run the installer. Follow the instructions...it's not that hard.
  4. For convenience, once it's installed, create a batch file in C:\MERCS that mounts the .cue file using the above imgmount command.
And that's all there is to it. One last thing, for best results run the game in fullscreen mode.

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