First post, by kjliew
In the past, I didn't bother to look into the regular versions of MW2 Mercenaries because only Direct3D was possible as hardware acceleration option. I was pretty happy with Titanium version and its 3Dfx Glide support. Checking out Wine AppDB, the game was considered garbage for Wine and none seemed to be interested to restore its playability. So I spent some time to work on this game. Initially, I had the game running but in-game textures were all lost and D3Derror.txt had tons of textures loading failures. I spent some time debugging the failures and was finally able to root cause them. It was a simple 1-liner patch to Wine DDRAW, and ka boom! The game became fully working and playable in its full glory, from QEMU on Win98 VM. 😀 Not sure if the same patch will help Wine on Linux without Win98 VM, but anyway for myself, WineD3D with Win98 VM is more manageable.
All versions of MW2 Mercenaries can now play from QEMU with WineD3D, so it is now possible to play the game in its initial settings of scripted salvage game or patched it up all the way for the new 1.1 with dynamic salvage game (and many bugs associated with the update). Many had expressed that scripted salvage game was indeed a better play. The Titanium version does not have the option for scripted salvage game and it was also being criticized for reducing CD tracks audio quality compared to retailed version to fit the game into the capacity of single CD.
So let's recap on all the versions:
- Retailed version 1.0 - DOS version included. Can be patched to 1.05 and 1.06. Patch 1.081 got Direct3D support but DOS version no longer worked, no MercsNet. The final patch 1.1 introduced dynamic salvage game and Direct3D version of MercsNet.
- 3Dfx version 1.05 - DOS version included. Can be patched to 1.1 for dynamic salvage game and Direct3D version of MercsNet.
- Enhanced Direct3D Video and 3D positional audio - it is newer than 3Dfx version 1.05 based on the file date on the CD and possibly more recent than patch 1.081. I think this is the best version for the original scripted salvage game. Its game shell supports higher resolutions up to 1280x960 but choosing 1024x768 or higher actually gives 800x600. *Cannot be patched*, so scripted salvage is all this version has to offer, unfortunately. I am not sure if there is any workaround to apply patch 1.1 to obtain dynamic salvage game.
They are all restored and playable from QEMU with hardware 3D acceleration at their best, on modern Linux and Windows 10. 😁
