Mercs 1.1 Audio Glitching

[archonambroseus]

After a few days of messing with my computer, I've finally gotten 31st Century Combat, Ghost Bear's Legacy, and Mercenaries all running pretty flawlessly on DOS via MechVM, thanks in no small part to the people here. However, I heard that patch 1.1 of Mercs introduces dynamic salvage, which I think would really add quite a bit to the gameplay. I found instructions for patching here and installed it (after making a backup copy, of course). While things seem to be running all right after a bit more finicking, I've run into one not terminal but very, very annoying audio glitch: after clicking most any menu option that results in the "boom" sound (typically ones that bring you to another menu), the sound effect seems to play around 20+ times over the course of a few seconds, which is 1) annoying 2) very loud and 3) causes every menu shift to take around an extra half-minute while the rest of the game runs fine in terms of framerate and navigation speed. Probably related, the ambient fire sound effects on the menu screens is now missing and after clicking "instant action," the "Accessing" sound effect loops.

Like I said, these are certainly tolerable, but if there's a way to get rid of them, that would be really, really nice. If it's not really fixable, should I instead try going with thecrankyhermit's method of patching?

This is running on XP with SP 3.

[Skyfaller]

I noticed that sound glitch in my own version of Mercs Win95 on XPSP3, thought I was the only one affected. You could try jumping to the various facilities by using the shortcuts mentioned in the menu. If we're not able to solve this otherwise, I might be able to make a patch that reduces the sounds to zero length.

[FreelancerMar]

The Audio glitch is a common one with ver 1.1!

The 1.1 Patch really is not meant for the DOS version of the game. It is meant to update you to the windows version of the game and perhaps give you D3D or 3DFX hardware acceleration. This means if you wish to continue playing without the audio glitch, you will in all likelyhood have to patch no further than 1.06 because anything after that will give you the audio problems you have described.

I have a machine running a 9X version of windows, which is the enviornment that the windows version of the game was programmed to run on. The audio Glitch for the DOS version is there even on this machine. I Run the windows version and the glitch is not there.

I Guess this means that you have a choice to make. I Wish you luck.

[Bossman]

I don't think this audio glitch is a DOS-exclusive issue at all. It's at least also a Windows problem. I too have Windows XP Pro SP3 and thought I was the only one suffering from this glitch (albeit, my issue's with the Windows version but it's the exact same problem). I've seen it mentioned nowhere else and thought I might just be borked. Kinda depressing. Luckily, I have the red retail Windows/DOS 1.05 disc so I've installed and been playing the game through DOSBox much to my sheer joy. I haven't played this game since I was probably 12 or 13, but this game had a tremendous impact on my tastes in games and fiction. Hell, I remember cracking open the encyclopedia one Saturday to read about commonwealths as I'd never heard of such a thing before playing Mercs. So it's been a pretty fun weekend, although it took about 14 straight 6-hour nights of tinkering and researching how to get the Windows version working before resorting to the proven DOSBox method. And now that I'm older and can more appreciate the horrific implications of a dystopic future in which men strap themselves into fusion-powered humanoid war machines and blow each other (and everything around them) to smitherines, well, the game is so much richer and enjoyable for all the years of life experience accumulated.

A quick side note - I consider myself somewhat of a retro gaming whiz and have found some truly bizarre ways over the years of getting old games to work on newer and newer PC builds. It will eventually be impossible, which is why I've kept two Win98SE machines in storage for over a decade (one PC with a Voodoo2, another with a 128 MB Geforce2). I remember thinking when I was a kid that backwards compatibility sounded more like a short-term sales pitch than a reasonable long-term likelihood, and have kept those machines in relatively good shape for a near future where they alone will hold the last vestiges of classic PC gaming's worthy legacy. But MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries has been, by far, the most significant challenge to my retro tastes yet. The sheer number of versions and possible solutions and tweaks, and the maddening randomness of coaxing the game to run on modern systems pales only to the monumental efforts of the fanbase on this site and others. So on behalf of all the folks who pirated the game, lurked in your forums, and went away when they got their results, I thank those involved thus far for having the stamina, cleverness, and generosity to preserve this game's impressive qualities.

And hopefully I can repay you all some day soon for my FINALLY achieving some results by blasting you into the next world with some LRM's, hehe...

...because yes, somehow, against all odds, while waiting for this forum's activation e-mail to show up, I decided to toy around with getting the game to work again and it freaking worked. I don't understand. I'll try to detail my method, though. I had nothing else installed at the time except DOSBox Mercs.

Never did I have a problem running the sim portion of the game with any of the solutions I'd tried previously. Just the perfectly-described "not terminal but very annoying" audio glitch, exactly as outlined above. The transitional audio in the 2D screens (such as "Instant Action Selected" when clicking the appropriate button in the main menu) is broken up into one second loops that repeat the same little bit of audio over and over again for 3-10 seconds before moving on to the rest of the audio file, until the file ends. Program audio resumes normally from there, until the next transitional audio cue... then the suffering begins again. It normally takes 2 or 3 seconds to get to the Instant Action menu but with this glitch it's like half a minute.

I tried MechVM first, but the glitch was still there, as it was the first time I tried MechVM. Then I tried just running basic 1.05 with Kontz'a method, but still the audio glitch. I also tried the old cranky hermit dude's Mercs 1.1 patch, which I hadn't tried before tonight. It actually fixed the audio glitch which was surprising and exhilirating but I had the rendering problems in the sim mode that others have described (featureless, blank terrain, only 'Mech shadows visible, etc), which was brutally disappointing. I thought, because the sim portion of the game had always worked before, that if I could just get rid of the audio glitch everything else would run fine as a given. I then tried MechVM again, and put the hermit dude's 1.1 patch over top of it. This did not work either - no audio glitch, but again the rendering was trashed.

I then deleted MechVM and the modded 1.1 build, which didn't actually uninstall anything at all because I'd replaced most of the game files from the actual install, so I manually deleted everything I could find. Then I installed a fresh 1.05 from the disc (mounted as an MDS image in Daemon Tools), ran the 1.1 patch twice (being careful not to close any of the error messages when they popped up, and making sure to install the D3D upgrades the first time running it) and used Kontza's method to patch the game. It worked. I don't know how, but it worked. I could have sworn I tried this exact sequence before but maybe not. Hell, for all the insanity I've experienced trying to get this game to work over the past two weeks, I bet the exact sequence is to install/uninstall all that crap in precisely the same order like some kinda weird Frankensteinian digital monstrosity... and it'll probably only work if you have the same system config as me, with the same drivers and firmware versions and everything. Lol. I dunno man, but somehow it freaking worked...

Anyway, I'm not really sure how one checks the software version, but I think it's at 1.1 because there are new menu options for the video card and such, and the game looks astounding. Compared to the DOSBox version, anyway... I still think the planets look beautiful even by today's standards. Softer lighting, crisp textures, detailed terrain and 'Mechs, the explosions look awesome. If there are better-looking versions out there I'd love to eBay them and try to get them working because if this is just regular factory 1.1, I can't wait to see what more advanced versions could potentially offer. Bounding around in a giant killer robot has never looked so good to me - a new MechWarrior obsession has been ignited somewhere in my inner child!

Only one bug to report - the well-known bug where the results screen is black after either aborting or completing a mission, but that's easily circumvented and I don't believe the MechLab bugs in the other two MW2 games apply to Mercs. So other than that, it all runs flawlessly as far as I can tell, and looks immaculate.

So, I would try installing the game, patching it to 1.1 by running the patcher twice (download the patch from this site), being careful not to clear any of the error messages and dragging them out of the way to make sure you can install the D3D software upgrades. Only when the "Patched Successfully!" screen pops up at the very end should you then close the error messages, and only AFTER closing the patching software itself (I don't remember if it closes automatically or not). The second time you run the patch you won't have to install the D3D upgrades again, or at least I didn't. The patch will simply complete in about half the time and give the same success screen at the end. Next, download the files for Kontza's patching method from this site, drop the files into your main Mercs directory, run MercProxyPatcher to get the proxy .dll's set up and then run MercPrep and set your video options (both included with Kontza's custom files, by the way). Finally, just set your Win95 compatibility mode for MERCSWIN.EXE and MERCNET.EXE (though I don't know if the MercNet thing matters in Windows, although my roomie and I wanna get a LAN party together if possible). Run the game and it should work... with no audio glitch. Basically I just used the Kontza method after patching to 1.1, nothing fancier than what you can find perusing these forums, but somehow it seems to have worked this time around.

At least, that's how it worked for me but it feels like we're facing a Hawaiian volcano god or something... you do the same ritual and dance over and over again and somehow, some way, even though you'd given up hope, the volano stops spewing lava and your village is randomly spared from the wrath of the gods... lol. Some of us get the game to work through the established methods, and some of us will never get the game to work. It truly sucks, but the above is what I did and it worked, by God it worked! Yes!

DOSBox is the most reliable way to play the game, for certain. I don't even know if I reformatted today and installed all the latest service packs and drivers, that I could get Mercs working in WinXP... so if anybody out there knows of a way to patch the game further and be rid of this audio glitch once and for all, I for one support your efforts! MechVM was acting pretty wonky tonight which was weird because it'd always been flawless before, but I was screwing around with combining patches and stuff so something probably got cross-wired and blew up. But MechVM worked perfectly the first time I used it, aside from that very irritating audio glitch.

This wordy post is hereby concluded.

BOSSMAN

[Skyfaller]

Hello Bossman, and welcome to mech2.org.

Thanks for the extensive report. I will test your solution when I find the time. Have fun with the game.

[Bossman]

Also, I ran the original installer from the disc in Windows 95 mode, with the 256-color option enabled under compatibility as well (that way the 256-color check will pass during the install), and ran the mpatch.exe 1.1 patch in Win98 compatibility mode (twice through, remember!). Then you just drop in Kontza's files, run the proxy patcher .bat and MercPrep to configure your video options, set the MERCSWIN and MERCNET compatibility, and it should work, or at least it did for me, exactly as described but I don't know why it's suddenly working now after a couple weeks straight with the audio glitch. Normally, I wouldn't consider these additional details noteworthy but given how finnicky Mercs can be, they ought to be mentioned.

Furthermore, I've troubleshooted both the audio glitch (with MechVM and Kontza's method) and the 3D rendering issues with hermit's 1.1 patch in every way possible. Two different sound cards, different drivers, different degrees of acceleration enabled... same with my graphics card, multiple driver sets and acceleration levels. Same results regardless, so it's not a hardware problem most likely, it is a software thing for both these issues, probably in Mercs itself somewhere (especially the audio glitch). Hopefully it's in Mercs, anyway, as I'm sure significant DirectX and DirectSound problems are irreparable but we seem to be having decent odds of success with the many user-made patches to the game.

If I think of anything else I'll post it up.

BOSSMAN

[Skyfaller]

Did you ever run MechPrep?

Nevertheless, you MUST run MechPrep at least once in your computer's lifetime or the game will fail once a mission begins.

viewtopic.php?f=17&t=514

Maybe this explains the white screens some players are experiencing.

[archonambroseus]

Did you ever run MechPrep?

Nevertheless, you MUST run MechPrep at least once in your computer's lifetime or the game will fail once a mission begins.

viewtopic.php?f=17&t=514

Maybe this explains the white screens some players are experiencing.

I'm pretty sure that's not the issue, or at least not always the issue, since I always ran MechPrep and still had the white screen problem.

Regardless, I finally got things working again using Kontza's method (I didn't follow Bossman's steps since it worked after just migrating over the patch files), with the lingering problem that I get monstrous slowdown unless run 320x200. I'm pretty much resigned to it just being my computer either not having enough graphics memory (although I doubt that) or that being a Pentium Mac it just doesn't run Windows that well – although it does fine on things like Mass Effect 2 so that would seem a bit off, perhaps it doesn't run older Windowses as well? Also, although lately troubleshooting Mercs has become something of a incomprehensible mush in my mind, I seem to recall MechPrep not actually influencing Mercs at all using this method, but like I said at least I can get it playable.

One final note is that it seems like 1.1 or at least my instance of 1.1 handles textures rather oddly, since the ground tends to flicker between textured and just a black plane and whereas buildings in 1.05 and 1.06 with object textures off are just monochrome cubes, turning off object textures in 1.1 just reduces the complexity of the textures. For example, in the first DCMS mission (not the training, the rebellion-squashing one), you can't differentiate between the lit-up third floor and the other floors unless you turn textures on, but most other buildings have cross-hatching and I believe bump maps representing floors and windows. Mechs, on the other hand, do show up as monochrome with object textures off.

But, at least it's playable. Perhaps once I get out of urban environments I'll be able to ramp the resolution back up.

[wjsim]

Sorry for bringing this post back from the dead but I really didn't want to create a new thread.

I'm running MW2:Merc fine on MechVM. I've patched to 1.1 and tried applying Kontza's patch as Bossman suggested but the audio glitch is still there. I've tried to look at the problem more fundamentally and suspect that it could be just outdated mapping of buttons to sound files. The sound files for those buttons are found in database.mw2 which can be easily accessed by using the file viewer in MechVM. I figured that this problem can easily be solved if I could rename the files in database.mw2 to match the ones referenced by the in-game buttons. Does anyone know if there is already a fix out there?

I don't see a function in MechVM to rename the files in database.mw2. A possible solution is to extract those files using "Save As" and subsequently "Replacing" them into database.mw2 under the correct filenames. Has anyone tried this? Or is this approach futile?

Hope to hear from fellow MW2 enthusiasts soon. Thank you.