u/Secret_Cow_5053

Sisters.

I'm just curious what everyone is using.

I've recently gotten all the old mechwarrior games running again so the hotas nerve in my brain is tingling again and i'm wondering what's good these days...for me i have to admit for mechwarrior 5

for me, i play like a filthy casual using an xbone controller but my headcanon is that a thousand years of development (or at least 450 years of development) would have lead to something approaching a dualstick control if we're not actually just steering the whole fucking thing with our brains via the neurohelmet to begin with..

imo mech evolution would move towards simplicity, not tank controls, for the sake of pilot performance. this is fly by wire, afterall, we don't have rudders mechanically attached to control surfaces.

This is the version to run on a modern system as far as i can tell: it just works, movies too: https://github.com/alariq/mc2/releases

download, unzip & enjoy. A few things to note:

1. mc2.exe is the executable you want to run. you probably will want to make a shortcut for it. You'll need to track down the icon file if you want the original, but you can find it in /assets/graphics in official game, so it should be in any of the ripped copies floating around too. it's not important, just a nice to have.

2. first run it'll run a weird image tests screen to set your video settings and close, just run it again and the game should be good.

3. it's a full rebuild so it still does some weird shit here and there. cheers to whoever is doing this.

Mods don't ban me, this is all shit hosted elsewhere (mostly myabandonware), I just made it work nice & easy... here's a link to a zip file with mw 1 and all three mw2 games ...ok i fixed the link. it's on my google drive though now, don't make me regret this.

Notes:

1. This is a dropbox Google Drive link of a big zip file. don't @ me if they shut it down after 50 downloads.
2. the music works becuase i am awesome. you can thank me later. yeah that means i included bin & cue files of the entire cds (which is why its as big as it is) and made sure they were connected properly in dos box. i don't think you need any special software it should just work.
3. Tested everything runs ok for me. there's a batch file in each subfolder (mw.bat, mw2.bat, gbl.bat and mercs.bat i think) - DON'T FUCK WITH THE FOLDER LAYOUT and everything should just work. you can ignore the other setup.bat files. like i said it's all set up.
4. dosbox plays nice with joy2key, but if you have a supported joystick it should also work out of the box as well. my advice: use the in-game control setup to set your joystick axis, and use joy2key or some other keyboard mapper to map button presses to whatever you want.
5. most of the original docs should be included as pdf files.

have fun.

I’m guessing windows 11 must have some sort of built in legacy OS support running under the hood because this is new: both mw3 AND mw4 are playing nice with my modern i9, nvidia 4070, w11 machine.

All I did to get Vengeance running (besides install from original discs) was drop in the latest patch and nocd fix (in that order, obviously). Both can be had from myabandonware. I installed from my own original discs tho bc I had them.

A couple of things that I just do in general and have have an impact (definitely did for mw3) is I force the aspect ratio to be maintained (black bars >> than W-I-D-E mechs) and more importantly, limit the frame rate to under 60. For mw3 you need it under 30 to deal with some physics issues, might be the case here as well if the fps goes above 60 but this is a “modern” game (in the losses sense of the word) so maybe/maybe not. It’s still a 32 bit game so who knows.

The internal controller configuration still kinda sucks though so an external mapper like joy2key might be advised as well.
But still! Mech warriors 1/2/3/4 all running! <3

Tested working Windows 11 6/4/2026 running a nvidia 4070 intel cpu machine.

For anyone who is interested...

1. Download the game, 1.2 patch, the nocd patch (if needed/wanted) from somewhere. myabandonware has it. run the patch first (after regular install, obviously)
2. ZipperFixUp: I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH: This fixes the gravity bugs and a few other issues with these games that otherwise make them unplayable on 64 bit systems. just extract and run the batch file in your mw3 folder. it'll create a new executable, you're gonna want to rename the original mech3.exe to mech3.exe.bak and rename the new file mech3.exe and run that for now on.
3. VIDEO: go into your video card control panel and set the game to lock the framerate at 27fps. I know, I know. but this also necessary for the physics to behave: it's just one of those games where the physics engine is tied to the framerate, and things do not behave if you're running above what it was expecting to run at. And yes, it was expecting 27 fps.
4. Optional: the game's max resolution is 1024/768, so lock the aspect ratio to 4:3 as well if you don't want W-I-D-E mechs.
5. in game you can set the graphics options to max everything. it will use like 0.1% of your graphics card, regardless of what it is.
6. AND FOR YOUR CONTROLLER, Joy2Key: be warned, the website kind of sucks, it's old freeware, so i'm linking the download directly becuase most of the 'download' buttons on that site link so some shady browser download, but joy2key itself is legit. This app lets you straight up assign keyboard commands to buttons presses, and it works great with gamepads as well as joysticks, and is super lightweight. just run it, set up your profile how you like it, and go to town. I prefer this for old games like mw3 over steam or anything else becuase it's lightweight and frankly just works, but if you have a remapper you prefer, than whatever - use it. Steam gamepad configurator does not play nice with mw3 for me.

My advice for configuring your controller: set up the axes in the in-game configuration (use the default joystick/keyboard configuration, then change the joystick axes as you want. if you're using a gamepad like a ps4 controller or something, X/Y is the left stick and Rx/Ry is the right stick.) Then go through all the config menus and delete all the default button configurations and let joy2key handle it. download the mw3 keyboard controls image file so you can refer to it to set up joy2key.

Of course you can skip joy2key if you prefer the mouse/keyboard setup but it's a little weird: mw3 comes from the days before wasd was the norm so the default movement buttons are the arrow keys and if you remap them in game, you're gonna have a bad time during the training missions if you play them (which you should). So keep a default configuration for the training missions specifically, then remap as you like after you are comfortable with the way the game plays. the missions EXPECT you to press S for startup/shutdown and will not advance in the training missions if you remap it. this goes for all the other commands as well. it's pretty annoying.

Ongoing hiccups: the music playback still sucks. after playing the track once in a mission it'll either not restart, or start skipping annoyingly. this is a nonissue if you just mount a disc iso or go nocd, you won't have music at all though. not my favorite. there's supposedly a media fix out there too but i'm not confident it's working 100% for me yet. i'll update if/when i get it going.

but other than the (arguably sub par) music playback, the game seems to be fully good to go! i'm on to mission 1/op 3 as of tonight. man after playing mw5 so much, this is a trip. it's like piloting a mack truck after driving a sports car lol.

Also if this happens to match any particular faction’s color scheme, do let me know. I just went with what looked cool.