Got an AMD Athlon 1700+ running at 1100Mhz
Got 512 Megs of DDR (266) RAM
Got a GeForce 4 MX 400 64 meg card
Got a major problem with Mech 4 Mercs!

Basically I start the thing and get a splash screen. Its a nice splash screen but I'm sure the game is a good bit more fun than that. It then goes fullscreen... and then cuts back to smallish window. At this point it does nasty things and locks up pretty much my entire system, trying to kill the process at this stage takes a good ten minutes if I'm patient, if not I'll just hit the reset button.

I have the Microsoft PR patch 1
I have updated my graphics card drivers
I have tried messing with graphics options in the auto-configury thing.
I have updated everything imaginable!
I've tried both complete and compact installs, both of which have been patched, I've even tried running it without the patch.

I appologise for coming here and essentially creating a throw away account to beg your help but I couldn't find any other place.

Help!

WIN 98 or XP ?

"My Lance needs ammo, coolant,& women, but not in that order".

******
Overheard outside unnamed house of ill repute

XP pro. Can't believe I left that out...

you have good enough hardware, Mercs can run on alot less.
So as a guess either you have a driver or compatability issue,
or something else like a back ground application or something...
Turbo tax ?
what other programs do you have installed ?

"My Lance needs ammo, coolant,& women, but not in that order".

******
Overheard outside unnamed house of ill repute

I am all of a sudden having a similar problem, and the wierd thing is it did run just fine on most of this hardware....

The last major hardware changes I made recently were the addition of a SATA hard drive which I then mirrored my old system to...and the first thing I checked was mercs, and it ran.

So, when the new mech packs came out I thought "hey great, let's check them out"....no go, get a wierd "Read command could not be made by 0x0075d9bd to ram sector 0x2199437b" EVERY time...hmmm, okay, uninstall, re-install....exact same thing....with just mercs, mercs with patch, mercs with patch and mech pack, mercs with patch and mechpack 1 and 1.1 and 2....always the same error, no eula, no autoconfig, just this error. Hmmm, did a clean boot, same error. Istalled on my second computer, runs just fine, mine always gives me the same error.

Got frustrated, looked for a no CD patch, guess what? Game runs. But there is no nocd patch for the mektek meck pack 2, so again I am SOL on this computer. Checked the Event protokol, seems the access to the CD drives (any of 6 different drives that I tried) is unsuccessful, but it doesn't say why. Got inspired, tried some Safedisk disabling tools...guess what? EXACTLY THE SAME ERROR. Even a safedisc cracked Image gives me exactly this same error....

Well, needless to say, I am bummed out, and wish I knew how to fix this...this is the only comp with I-Net access, so playing on one of the other comps is for me not an option (and besides, I wan't to figure out what caused this)

Any help is appreciated, but any jerk says "Format C: and re-install WinXp" can just hold their tongue, ALL other games run absolutely fine, ONLY Mercs won't work any more (and no, no turbo tax, I live in germany)and some of these other games, CoD:UO for example won't even install on some systems if something isn't kosher, me, I had no probs at all and these games are really picky!

Edit: Well, one other game doesn't work anymore, Crimson Skies, also from MS, and guess what the common denominator is? Safedisc version 1.50.020, Both of these games which no longer work have the same safedisc version....games with higher versions work, just these two don't, and it is quite a bummer...heck, I have done clean boots, everything, and JUST THESE TWO games won't work anymore....kinda makes me wonder what the heck is on my system that would affect such an outdated protection system, especially when they both worked before on this install and system.

Major William "Billybones" Ebaugh
AKA "Chopped Liver"
Commander, Delta Division
PaleRiders UeberUrbie Brigade

SETI @ Home runs in the background, I have tried it with it disabled,
PC-Cillin,
AVG,
Trillian, tried it with trillian down.

I mean my computer has tackled, for want of a better term 'harder' games with these programs running in the background.

When I call up task manager to try and kill it it is taking 99 CPU time, thing is it isn't actually accessing disc or CD or anything. Its incredibly annoying.

In response to the edit above, I also have Crimson Skies, purrs like a kitten.

I have gone through all my games, only these 2 won't run by me anymore, even MW4:V and Black Knight work, but they do have a diferent version of safedisc than mercs and Crimson skies...

I am starting to think this could be a problem with another copy protection system known as Starforce, found on games like Codename-Panzers for example....if anyone else has a similar problem and has a game with Starforce installed, let me know.

In the meantine I will just add an old HD to my system, and put just xp and the game on it and run it from there...it is not the way I would like to fix this problem, but hey, it works!

Major William "Billybones" Ebaugh
AKA "Chopped Liver"
Commander, Delta Division
PaleRiders UeberUrbie Brigade

Solved it by going offline and shutting down _everything_ it hung for a moment before loading an autoconfig, I hope its done hanging now as I would like to play it online and well... firewalls are really a nessecity these days.

Lucky you, I have tried clean boots and get the same error message every time....with my second drive it works, so I know it must be some kind of software interference on my system, what is causing it though I have no idea, I have even tried running the game in safe mode and still get the same damned error, so it is not something running in the background, and since it runs from the second drive/xp installation it has nothing to do with the hardware....oh well, guess I need to keep looking.

Major William "Billybones" Ebaugh
AKA "Chopped Liver"
Commander, Delta Division
PaleRiders UeberUrbie Brigade

Oh don't get me wrong I tried clean boots before, what I hadn't tried was shutting down every single background task I had running as that is a HUGE mistake if you are online with a good firewall in place.

See some background tasks start up the instant the windows does and run without telling you (Well not entirely correct but they don't grab your attention that they are running).

As an aside I'd like to thank all you great folks for your help. It may have been ultimately superflous but you tried to give me a hand and in the end isn't that was counts? Thanks buddies.