How do I run archaic Mechwarrior 2 on an IBM Thinkpad with Windows XP?

Question

I can load the game and see the intro movie. After that I hear the sounds but my screen is black. I can't even figure out how to exit the game without rebooting the computer. I suspect I need a VESA driver, but I have no idea which one or how to get it.

Answer 1

I don't know about a VESA driver, but I do know that Windows XP has a fair PC emulation version. Go to Windows Explorer and navigate to the Mechwarrior 2 folder, probably under C:Program Files/Mechwarrior2.

Then select each executable file (filename.exe) and right click on it then go down to the properties option and select that. A dialogue box will open up and you have to select the third tab "Compability" Then you can select a previous version of windows emulator, you can also select a smaller video color range by going down to 256; this might help. Try to change all the executable files to emulate a version of Windows that you know it will work on and then see if your program works. If that fails then you might want to decrease the color depth. However, if the emulator works then it should be handle the color depth. If I remember correctly Mechwarrior v2 worked on Windows 98.

The emulator is not perfect though and some programs just won't work on new versions of Windows. That's the price of upgrading and letting programs try to handle Windows functions with their program instead of letting Windows handle it. In the early days the bugs in Windows made this a good option, but now days the basic Windows interface is more stable (of course when Microsoft starts adding more functions to the program then they risk creating unstable conditions, it is also why I won't switch to Windows Vista until at least service pack two has been put out).

If you need a VESA driver then check out some of these websites on a Google Search: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&aq=t&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLR,GGLR:2006-49,GGLR:en&q=vesa+driver

Answer 2

get windows 98, it's pretty much impossible on xp