Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries

[Guest]

Has anyone had any luck in getting this program to run properly under Vista
with the Mech Paks installed?

I'm sure I'm not the only person having this problem: Launching
Mercenaries, patched to PR1, with the Mech Paks installed, results in a quit
to desktop immediately after displaying the splash screen without any error
message.

I've run into comments on various modding forums that the problem involves
an incompatibility between Vista and either C-Dilla or SafeDisc.
Macrovision, who makes both, I believe, makes no mention of it, nor does
Microsoft on any forum or knowledge base I've referenced to date. In fact,
about the only useful information I've found is that Microsoft has stopped
supporting MW4 altogether as of July this year.

Using tips from those modding forums I was looking at, I was able to get
Mercenaries to run by renaming the ISPAK and CLANPAK directories, and
replacing EBUEula.dll and EBUSetup.sem with the corresponding files from
Mechwarrior 4: Vengeance. Of course, doing this means that I cannot use the
Mech Paks.

Is there a solution to this problem?

 

[Ace]

Had a similar problem when I moved over to XP Pro.
Some games, if not most, require the disc to be present in a drive before
the game will start.
Windows XP uses a different system to 'talk' to CD/DVD drives compared to
say, Windows 98, where the games would work fine.
An example of such a game is Populous: The Beginning, and Drakan: Order
of the Flame.
Both of these games will not work under XP Pro or Vista even with the
disc present. Installing goes just dandy, but it stops there as the game
runner process can't locate the disc because of the way the operating
system handles calls to the CD/DVD drives.

The solution was a No-CD crack, resulting in the games no longer looking
for their discs in order to play.
In legal la la land this is illegal as you are altering the software
and/or circumventing copy protection (SafeDISC, C-Dilla, SecuROM,
whatever); but in my opinion justified to run a perfectly good game you
paid for and own the original disc for.