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Seems that MechWarrior 4 just recently either ran out on it's copyright, or was released as Abandonware/Freeware. A website called TekMech (I believe) seems to have gotten the game in its entirety, and is releasing it free of charge and free to play, with the old servers still available.

I'm having a little trouble getting the actual game to run (Norton and a lot of other antiviruses apparently don't like it, though it in itself is not infected (there's troubleshooting threads on this- the game seems to 'ring up' as a virus for some reason)) but I've been fooling around with the Trial version that's still available on the Windows HTML site, and it is a brilliant game, that may very well fill my longing for Chrome Hounds action.


So, any other Dakkaites/nauts play, will play or have played this game?

It is MekTek.net, and they released the free version a few months ago. A good reminder, though!

Check your compatibility settings for the game. Make sure you set it back to Windows XP and it should fix quite a bit of the errors.

That should help, yes.

Now to figure out how to do that.


In any case, I looked, couldn't find a recent thread, and figured that there's probably enough Dakkanauts/ites playing it that it could benefit from some community.

I would love to be able to play Mechwarrior 4 again, but that sounds like too much fiddly computer headache.

From their website, MekTek is working on a simple, one-step .exe file that'll install and run their launcher, where you can run MechWarrior 4 from.

Aside from that, there's probably a lot less 'fiddle' than you'd think- proper use of the search function included in most anti-virus programs should let you mark the game as an 'exception', and there's probably a million tutorials out there for backwards compatibility with games.

All I'd like to know is where to find it, myeslf. YOu know how to do what you suggested, Mattlov?

Sweet. Although I vividly remember the controls are absolute madness without a joystick.

I got it working without a hitch on windows 7 by just using the .exe file on there.

Unfortunately, it's still not very good compared to the previous games though...

I believe it's an issue with Antiviruses stopping it from running... Either that, our you already have it set up in the proper compatibility mode.

But yeah, the controls are madness. I don't know if I'd be able to do any single-player, since right now I'm just working on getting decent keybindings for mouse use- for some reason, the center and right mouse buttons don't map in the Trial version (which I'm using to practice.)

I find it easiest to use mouse for aiming and primary/fastest recycle weapon, and wasd for accel/deccel and leg twist, with the 1234 buttons assigned as the rest of the weapons groups.

Also having a lot of fun with a flamethrower-filled Awesome, though I think I'll be trying artillery and using Catapult-style long range missiles more.

Well, mechwarrior mercenaries has been free for a pretty long time. Or rather, it's been free and available from mektek. However, their launcher and bundled installer is terrible to use. If your connection fluctuates or has some sort of hickup, it will corrupt the whole thing and you have to start over. If you try to download the files from somewhere else and use them on the installer it will tell you to insert the mechwarrior CD. If you get through the install process and get it to run, consider yourself lucky because there's a crap ton of things that can go wrong before you get to that point, and it's plagued many people.

MekTek has been releasing MW4 Mercs as freeware for several years actually. Microsoft apparently stopped caring and gave them permission to distribute the game free of charge. Antivirus will pick up their launcher as a virus, but don't worry about it, its not.

Their torrent takes forever though cause no one seeds and hardly anyone actually uses their launcher XD. They added a mountain of mechs though and lots of new weapons too. They even added the power armor which is hilarious to run around in.

Well, I only heard about it a bit ago.

Thing is, my antivirus isn't bugging out about the launcher at all- it's supposedly just the game, but we'll see. I have had no luck getting the game by itself to run properly, so I'm trying this out.

There's online play, correct? Anyone here play?

Anvildude wrote:There's online play, correct? Anyone here play?

Its complicated. The online servers have been down for years. MekTek provides a service that you can download I believe.

Yeah, just managed that. Game works fine, through it.

I think there's also p2p/isp direct connections allowed, though I don't know how useful/safe/used that is.

Rather enjoying the game, but dang, it's got a lot of complexity in management- not too bad, though, as long as you don't lose too much.

Wish there were more descriptions of the individual mechs, though.