Game:

MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat (1995)

Duration: 0:00

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17

REAL HARDWARE CAPTURE IN 8:5/16:10 ASPECT RATIO. Commentary subtitles are available!
Hooooly sh*t, it sure took me long enough to continue capturing again, huh?

Here is some footage from the original MS-DOS PC version of Mechwarrior 2 (Activision, 1995), specifically the completely unpatched retail US version (1.0). This isn’t exactly a game I’m very skilled at (as I was recently reminded by after re-experiencing some of the truly brutal defend-the-super-fragile-objective missions) so I didn’t capture the cool ice level with a reflective terrain plane. It’s a shame but then I didn’t want to spend too much time with configuring a half-decent mech for each mission.

How's the performance?
It's certainly acceptable in VGA 320x200 mode most of the time. With that in mind and considering its largely non-textured environments and aggressive level-of-detail (LOD) switching for landscape geometry, I'm not sure if I think the game is outright well-optimized or anything but performance is not particularly unusual for your average (semi-)textured 3D game in '95 on a Pentium 90 neither. When things slow down a notch too much the weapon firing input can sometimes be ignored if you don't click/press the button/key for long enough. Just don't expect resolutions above 320x200 (640x480 and beyond) to be a fun time, as no computer at the time could run MW2 at such resolutions without becoming a slideshow (unless staring at a perfectly flat empty terrain is your kinda thing)!

Does image enhancement mode (“wireframe mode”, basically) speed up performance? Not really. As I don’t typically like reducing graphical details unless absolutely necessary, I can’t comment on how the lower detail settings may or may not noticeably improve performance (and because I didn’t try them out, period).

Drivers used for ATi Mach 64: Out-of-the-box drivers from the Windows 95 RTM (OEM) CD-ROM.
Drivers used for Sound Blaster AWE32: Out-of-the-box drivers from the Windows 95 RTM (OEM) CD-ROM.

This footage and audio was captured from the following computer:
Gateway 2000 P5-90 case and motherboard (manufactured April 27th 1994)
Intel 430NX chipset
Intel Pentium 90 Mhz processor (S-Spec SX879, heatspreader is marked week 12 1994)
256 KBs of asynchronous L2 cache
ATi Graphics Pro Turbo (Mach64 GX) 4 MB graphics card (P/N 109-25500-10, early revision with silk-screened blank FCC ID white rectangle, sticker with “FCC ID: EXM255” on card, manufactured around April 1994)
Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE32 sound card (CT2760, board manufactured week 8 1994, serial number is 2765)
48 MBs of FPM DRAM; 8MBx2 (Q1 1993) and 16MBx2 (week 10 1997) SIMM, 60ns

The capturing was done with VCS (which can be found on the Internet Archive) and OBS Studio using a Datapath VisionRGB-E1S PCI-Express capture card plugged into an ASUS Maximus IV Extreme motherboard with an Intel Core i7-2600K using 8 GBs of DDR3 SDRAM and an nVidia GTX 580 video card installed. A VGA-to-DVI cable is connected between the source computer and the Datapath capture card to enable video capturing. Audio capture was done by feeding a 3.5mm stereo jack cable into the line in on the ASUS Maximus IV Extreme motherboard from the sound card of the vintage computer. Resizing/upscaling of the raw original 640x400 capture to 3200x2400 was done using VirtualDub2.

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - Scenario 1 (first mission)
3:03 - Scenario 2 (demanding terrain)
4:41 - Scenario 3 (trial)
7:28 - Scenario 4 (destruction)

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