Patching MechCommander's "left arm bug" for fun and profit

The board game has extensive rules on mech design, but for weapons, it's just wherever they'll fit. Some of the built-in hardware has fixed locations: cockpit, life support, sensors go in the head; engines go in the center torso (with light and xtralight fusion engines spilling out into the side torsos as well), arm and hand actuators go in the arms, and hip, leg, and foot actuators go in the legs. You can see this in the critical slot section in a record sheet: https://i.redd.it/jt3p2f1v14gf1.jpeg

This one definitely deviates from tabletop: pretty much everything except the smallest weapons have an integral tonnage, and the weapons themselves don't line up directly with their tabletop versions.

The newer games tend to be absolutely consistent with the mech design rules in terms of what weapons are available, and their weights and sizes, such that board game designs are legal in the game (and usually the state you get the mechs in before you customize them), and customized mechs are legal board game designs. They tend to limit the customization by doing things like having mechs have predefined hardpoints that limit what types/sizes of guns can go where, because otherwise you just end up with every mech being identical, with maximum armor and the rest of the tonnage being spent on whatever happens to be the most optimal weapon.

Btw, I recently did my first patches with ghidra. Is there any way to avoid jumping into a code cave by shifting all the instructions up then updating any statements referring to those memory locations? Seems like it should be simple enoigh in theory, but I didn't find an implementation on a cursory search. Could probably code up a plugin pretty easily.

As far as I know even DH is still only modifying the game at the data files level, not the "actual code" level (with the exclusion of the resolution edits).

So probably the fix for the left arm bug will work fine for DH or any of RizZen's other campaigns, but because of the new weapons I wouldn't bother using the weapon classification fix unless you revise the fix to match the modded weapons (which is unlikely to be worth the effort tbh).

Mplayer maybe?

gamespy flash backs for me.

A rare gem to see someone talking about MF. I used to play lots of it with friends, our games would last for over 48 hours (we wouldn’t sleep). Different time.

In my experience it was not that hard (as far as 25 year old games go) to get running on a Windows 10 system, which is what I played MC1 on and made Mantis on. I wrote down the steps I used[1] but there are alternative approaches using e.g., dgVoodoo which are not hard to find if you search for them. As far as I'm aware there's no need to use a retro system to reliably run MC1.

If you are for some reason intent on playing MC1 on a retro rather than modern system, Mantis is just a glorified automated hex editor and you can byte-for-byte replicate what it does to the game exe by copy-pasting the hex edits which are already outlined in the OP (for the bug fixes) and elsewhere (for the rest of what Mantis does).

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[1] https://mhloppy.com/2026/04/mechcommander-windows-10-without...

>probably get it working for Apple

I've gotten older games running just fine with Whisky/game porting toolkit. Sometimes you also need something to fix old DirectX issues like dgvoodoo2.

If you want to make it even easier you could try loading it via Heroic Launcher which supports game porting toolkit.

(Do note: whisky.app is out of development now that the Dev quit to do being pestered by the community so much)

I remember it taking me ages to complete the demo missions. And once I had, there being tons of replay value just in the demo missions.