The CD case was all warped due to heat, the CD didn’t survive either :/
How long was it there? Some years, i think
When I was in my teens I played Mechwarrior, a LOT, with my friend Dan. I don’t remember what version it was at the time, but it was early on. One of us would build a Flea and try to take down the other in an ultra-heavy mech.
Dan died about 2 years ago. I just went on an emotional roller coaster for a few minutes. Hug your friends.
Sorry to hear about your friend, it sounds like you meant a lot to each other. I second that our friends all deserve to know how much we love them.
One of my favorite gaming memories is playing MW4: Mercenaries with roommates circa 2002, where I won the grand championship piloting a Cougar.
EDIT: Just remembered my “Daishi Pepperbox”: assault-class Daishi fitted with nothing but machine guns and as much frontal armor as it could carry. My strat was to charge straight at opponents, let the armor soak up incoming fire, then drop an alpha strike as soon as I got into machine gun range. Watching their mech turn from green to red to black on my HUD in just a handful of seconds was glorious.
I hope those memories are great. Dan might no longer be with you or his family, but the memory lives on, cherish that. Be someone else’s Dan, too, there is always time :)
That game came out in 94 or 95. I use to play it on a 486 DX2 50
…
How long has it been since you’ve cleaned your car, kimosabe? 🤣
With TURBO MODE ON babyyyy
#BringBackTurboButtons, but now so we can underclock our PCs to save power and heat
And keys. Physical keys.
Yeah! And power supplies that could power our monitors too!
I never turned Turbo off on mine.
This game had some of the most immersive hardware controls and interfaces. It supported a Thrustmaster Mark 2flight stick for your right hand control to aim your weapons:
…a Thrustmaster Mark 2 throttle control for walking speed:
… Thrustmaster pedals for torso twist:
…and even i-glasses VR headset (with head motion tracking that would turn the Mech pilots head inside the cockpit!)
Woah, whhaaa?! That game came out in like 1995. I played it and thought it was great but had no idea it had all the hardware compatibility you’re pointing out!
Yeah, me either. I just played it with a keyboard.
At that time I had 2 voodoo 3d cards in sli mode and could play anything voodoo compatible in 3d with glasses.
It was cool but it was, is and will always be very niche (stereoscopic viewing).
That’s super cool! Did each eye get rendered from a slightly different position? Seems like the game itself would need to support that? Maybe I don’t really understand 3d graphics apis very well though.
Yes and no. That’s why it wasn’t perfect, it also produced some unusable results.
I think it was the wicked 3d voodoo2. Information on this is rather scarce on the internet.
Seriously?? How is THIS the first I’m hearing about all this??
How was this all possible in 1995 but we had to wait for modders to make the latest MW have those features?
Because PGI are an absolute cumstain of a company that broke their promises of what they were going to do with the franchise right at the get go.
They watered down the flagship product (MW:Online) of them taking over the franchise to “appeal to a wider audience”, while cramming in greedy pay-to-win micro-transactions and alienated and pissed off all the long time fans that paid into the crowdfunding.
When revenue tanked, everything after that was progressively more “minimum viable product that has to work on an Xbox pad held by a five year old with one eye”.
Edit: If they ever do anything else with the franchise, I fully expect it to be 100% AI slop development and artwork.
This game was the shit when it came out. All the force feedback controls were just perfect.
Fuck me, I want to experience the game with all that hardware!
This and Descent are the reasons I play with an inverted Y axis to this day.
Oh my. I remember playing Descent on my Compaq Pentium 486dx. Good times.
I had this on the 486dx2 66MHz. It ran smooth.
Stop bragging, not all of us can splash out the cash to upgrade from 386. :(
Well, to be fair, you wouldn’t need as much ram as you do now a days…
Not the same person you replied to, but I first played Descent on my 386 too, but it didn’t run truly smooth unless two upgrades and years later on a dx266. Same with Doom too, really,
I think you’re memory is fuzzy, it was either a Pentium or a 486, not both.
We played it on a Mac Performa with like 24mb ram and maybe a 75 MHz PPC processor.
That and a starter’s Jedi game were the first FPV 3D games we’d ever played at home. (Someone had installed doom on the auto as compys at highschool).
I remember my first laptop, a b+w PowerBook 520 with 4MB RAM. I bought an 8MB upgrade for it that was $410. You think RAM is expensive today…
I always played with a keyboard and years later I saw someone playing it using a fancy joystick and inverted Y axis and I was shocked at how much more effective it was.
Hey, those were the first two games I got to emulate - but including Descent 2.
Reactor online…
Sensors online…
Weapons online…
…
All systems nominal.
I need this to play when my computer starts up…does Linux have a way to do this??..questions for later.
Yes, I’ve been messing with it lately, can’t remember the details, but i’ll go look I’m a while.
Edit: the dos version works fine in dosbox, the only thing I see is a note in my startup conf reminding me to stop my kvm, barrier. have not succeeded in running any of the better graphics build.
If you need just the straight up music/sfx files, I do believe I have a copy of this game on a cd still (and the original expansion disk!) that I can copy and put somewhere for people.
In KDE, YES!
Crap, I can’t remember 100% how I did it but they support sound themes now.
But my OpenSUSE Tumbleweed system running KDE6 starts up with this startup sound, I think I pulled the MechWarrior Online startup sound off YouTube or something. :)
…Now if only I could make my car do this… 😂
Oh…my gosh…I didn’t even think about having this in a car! I don’t need to go down this rabbit hole but this is risking it lol
Just add a service that plays a sound on system startup
Never done that before but I’m sure I can figure it out, thanks!
Dang, that brings back memories!
Klingon phaser SFX
Pop that disc into a CD player and listen to all the level background music!
I think you could do that with Quake too.
An awful lot of early CD games would let you do that. Track 1 was the data and tracks 2-whatever were individual songs from the ST, because that’s how the game played the soundtrack audio, by treating it like an audio CD. That really only changed once audio compression got better and other assets got larger so there was a better way to use the space.
But when CDs first landed your storage media moved from 1.44MB disks (PC) or <= 6MB cartridges (SNES) to 640-700 MB it took a while before code and graphical assets started using a lot of that and well, you are paying for the whole CD either way, may as well use all the space.
Monkey Island too!
A lot of original PlayStation games as well
the CD didn’t survive either :/
4x4 Evolution too
I remember begging my mom for this game when it was in a large box at Costco when I was a kid. That giant stompy robot was just too cool.
I remember it being right next to Wheel of Time. Didn’t get to play that one though. :)
This game along with StarSiege was a huge part of my childhood.
Gotta say though, once you’ve felt the sheer ridiculous power of an OmniMech, playing Succession Wars era games took a bit of getting used to.
MechWarrior 2 and 3 allowed for some ridiculous cheese builds that were so fun(ny). :)
The thing I Rembert most about this game is picking a light mech jumping and immediately destroying both of my legs when landing on the ground. 10/10 would love to play again.
Mine came with a sidewinder joystick. Thank you Tiger Express. Had to spend $200+ for 4mb more of ram(8 total) just to run it.
I bought the sidewinder joystick because of it!
I should play games that use a joystick again. Or, you know, games in general.
I bought a “Force Feedback Pro” joystick that came with Interstate '76 and MDK
i76 was great. I remember playing MW2, MW Mercenaries, and i76 all around the same era.
Same game engine!
Yeah it was awesome, it was a great gift tbh
Oh man, Tiger Express. That was my goto…
That is some true lostech there, quiaff?
loved the music in this game!!! still listen to it from time to time
Love it! Still play through single player for both clans at least once a year.
That goddamned dome mission once a year? You masochist.
Best game. Amazing soundtrack
The Timothy Seals covers are amazing.
Ooh thanks! I’ll check that out.
I still listen to that soundtrack
How long was it there? Some years, i think
release date: 1995
Intro video upscaled: https://youtu.be/o1a18jETT-g
Yep, I still remember it like yesterday.
Watched this so many times back in the day, it was sooo cool
I remember watching the Mechcommander opening scene a bunch, which apparently got a remaster.
Looks like the Mechwarrior intros all got remasters–here’s MW2
That was a very well produced intro movie. I was even impressed by the acting and back then VG acting was…not great.
Except for the Red Alert C&C movies. “SPACE!!”
Anyone remember the Wing Commander 3 and 4 cutscenes?
Mark Hammil, John Ryhs-Davies, Malcolm McDowell, Tom Wilson, Casper Van-Dien, and even Walton Goggins!
Yeah, Mechcommander and MechWarrior 4 had suprisingly good live action stuff.
My favourite little thing about Mechcommander was that once you started the mission you got screen with “Connecting to the battlefield…” and static and noise. That’s one way of making loading screens more diegetic, I guess.
