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Mortyr 2093-1944


Genre: First Person Shooter
Release Year: 1999
Developer: Mirage Media
Publisher: Interplay
Age Rating: 18+
Playability Status: Playable (with significant issues)
Tested On: Windows 10 x64
Availability: Copyright retained - Out of print/unavailable

When it comes to evil empires, they don’t come much more evil and sinister than the Third Reich, which is probably why gamers seem to enjoy shooting SS troops so much. In this 1999 first person shooter you need to go back in time to stop Nazi Germany winning the second world war with a mysterious and sinister secret weapon. Clearly taking its inspiration from the ever popular Wolfenstein games, you’ll fight the fascist hordes through gothic churches and castles as well as futuristic cities and bases.

Installation

Mortyr should install on modern systems just by running the installer on the disc. However, the installation program clearly isn’t the most robust. Before installing, you must make sure that your game CD is in the optical drive that is first alphabetically. So for instance if you have a DVD drive as drive letter D: and a virtual drive as letter E:, you must install from the drive with letter D:.

You may also find the installer takes a long time to start, sometimes several minutes. On some systems it may not start at all, or start and then freeze. In this case it may be necessary to find an old PC running Windows XP or earlier (a virtual machine will do too) and install there. You can then simply copy the installation directory from your old PC to your new rig and run the game by starting the “Mortyr.exe” executable file.

Patching and preparing to run

Finding information about patches for this game proved difficult. Thanks to Davros on the excellent Vogons.org forum we were able to uncover this patch, though the notes in the patch don’t explain exactly what it does. Installing it as per the readme file contained in the zip file didn’t seem to change anything with the game.

On modern PCs you should also run the game using the excellent dgVoodoo2 DirectX wrapper program, if possible. Mortyr uses DirectX (version 4 according to our research) so you should configure dgVoodoo2 to run in DirectX mode. The default configuration is fine for this game and trying other options didn’t seem to make much difference. If you run the game without dgVoodoo2 you will find that it locks up whenever you try and change from the default screen resolution.

There’s one last tweak you will want to perform before trying to run the game. Mortyr does not have copy protection, but it will ask for the CD to be inserted if you do not perform this last step. Open your Mortyr game folder in Windows Explorer or File Explorer (C:\Program Files (x86)\Mirage Media\Mortyr by default). and then open the Data sub folder. In the folder you will find a file called “cdrom.std”. Open this file in Notepad or your favourite text editor. If you’re not familiar with editing text files, see this page.

The cdrom.std file should contain just one single line of text, a file path pointing to your CD-ROM drive. Change this to point to the Data sub-folder within the games directory. If you installed the game to the default directory, the line should then read “C:\Program Files (x86)\Mirage Media\Mortyr\Data” on a 64 bit system or “C:\Program Files\Mirage Media\Mortyr\Data” on a 32 bit system. Save the file when you are done editing it. You’re now ready to start the game.

Tweaking visual quality

There are a handful of visual quality options you can set in-game. Start the game and press the escape key, then choose “Options”. First of all, choose “Video Resolution”. 1024×768 is the highest available, though there is the possibility of using a widescreen patch that we will get to later.

You can also choose “Advanced Options” from the games main menu and turn on some extra features like fog and mirrors, though these should be on by default.

Playing in Widescreen

Widescreen gaming forums have a downloadable patch for Mortyr to enable the game to run in widescreen resolutions. You can find the patch here. To use the patch, first open the 7z file (if you’re not familiar with 7zip files, see this tutorial). Inside the file you will find a sub-folder called “English” and one called “Polish”. Open either of these folders and you will find several sub-directories named with different resolutions. If you want 1080p resolution, for instance, open the 1920×1080 folder and then copy the MORTYR.EXE file within into your Mortyr game folder (C:\Program Files (x86)\Mirage Media\Mortyr by default). Before you do this, we strongly recommend taking a backup of your original Mortyr.exe game file.

Unfortunately the widescreen patch wouldn’t work with our copy of the game. The included executable file was a completely different size to the one we already had (our file was a whole 24kb bigger) and trying to run the widescreen patched version just gave us an “Incorrect data version” error.

Troubleshooting and known issues

This game has a number of serious issues when running on modern PCs:-

Game freezes when changing resolutions – To get around this problem, run the game using the dgVoodoo2 wrapper software.

Game runs too fast – On modern PCs the game runs too fast, making it difficult to play. There’s currently no known workaround for this. Other sites on the internet suggest that using dgVoodoo2 will fix this problem, but this wasn’t the case in our tests.

In-game audio cuts out when screen resolution is changed – We found that the games audio would sometimes disappear after changing screen resolution. Simply exit the game and start it again to correct this issue.

Introduction movie does not play – Possibly due to a codec issue, the opening movie for the game did not play on our system. While the audio played just fine, the video simply displayed a black screen. This may mean that later cut-scenes do not play either.

Virtual machines – Mortyr 2093-1944 is NOT compatible with the VMWare player virtual machine or Virtualbox (Windows XP guest). The game simply crashes with a “DirectDraw function unsupported” error.

Can you submit a fix?

Know how to get this game running better on a modern PC? Let us know in the comments and help the PC retro-gaming community!

31 comments

  1. Henry says:

    Hi. In order to view the cutscenes, make sure to run the games in compatibility mode set to Windows XP Service Pack 3.

  2. Henry says:

    In order for the game to not run fast, one must limit the framerate to 30FPS. This is possible using RivaTuner, which comes exclusively packaged through the MSI Afterburner overclocking utility. You may also use other third-party programs to limit the framerate.

  3. Edoardo says:

    Hi, following your instructions the game doesn’t work on my pc, it starts, i can see menu and move in it but in game video is totally distorced, what can i do to play it? I’m trying on win 7 with an Intel integrated video. Sorry for baad english, i’m italian.

  4. Edoardo says:

    If I tried to install win98 on a partition you think might work ? Thanks anyway , you’ve been very kind !

    • Henry says:

      What I have read online is that Mortyr is not compatible with newer operating systems or even newer videocards. The issue might be solved by installing Windows 98, but it also might not work since the game could just be incompatible with the Intel built-in graphic cards.

      It might work or might not, I’m unsure.

  5. Morgan says:

    Hi everyone.

    i’m having a hard time to run Mortyr on my windows 10 laptop. I’m used to do all kinds of tweaky stuff to play old games but this time I’m stuck.

    The thing is even with voodoo software it won’t open because a windows says
    ” Mortyr need this fonctionality to work :

    DirectPlay

    If I try to run the game despite of the message it show an error message ( 0xc0000022)

    And last version of Directplay won’t work on my system.

    I’m lost so I’m really curious if anyone out there have the same issue or a solution.

    Thank you kindly

    • Henry says:

      Hi Morgan,

      I have not ran into this issue despite being on Windows 10. However, I have found this video which should (in theory) enable the legacy feature Directplay on your Windows 10 machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XYyGB-Tn3g

      If you are unable to watch the video, here are the instructions in text format:

      1. Right click on your Windows logo on the bottom left corner.
      2. Select “Programs and Features”. This option should be at the very top.
      3. On the left hand side of the window that has opened up, select the option “Turn Windows features on or off”
      4. Expand the option “Legacy Components”
      5. Press on the box to place a check mark on the option “DirectPlay”
      6. Press “OK”

      Please note, multiple users have experienced issues with video games requiring DirectPlay and Skype or their antivirus program running in the background. If the above instructions do not help, try disabling Skype and/or your antivirus software.

      Henry.

  6. Michael says:

    Hy. I download mortyr and when i finished installing, i tried to play but it brings out an AR message saying ‘mode not initialized.’ please how do i fix this??

  7. Peter says:

    Hi I have Mortyr 2093-1944 and I can’t seem to install it it keeps on giving me errors. PLS HLP

    • Henry says:

      What does the error say exactly? Do you have a disc copy of the game or did you pirate it? What operating system are you running?

  8. Lucas says:

    Hey about the installation taking a long time to start. I found a solution on another site somewhere. Open task manager, find the installation process and right click on it. Click “Go to details.” Right click on the selected item and click on analyze wait chain. Click end process on the window that pops up and the installation should start.

  9. Giacomo says:

    Hi,
    I tried to install Mortyr but during the installation it gives me 5 errors:

    – “Unable to open input MAIN.HAL in D:\data\.”
    – “Unable to open input INTRO.AVI in D:\data\.”
    – “Unable to open input MIRAGE.AVI in D:\data\.”
    – “Unable to open input OUTRO.AVI in D:\data\.”
    – “Unable to open input HD.AVI in D:\data\.”

    From that on, it stops the process of installation.
    Do you have any idea on how to work this out?
    Thank you very much, I’ve searched everywhere but no one seem to know what to do!

  10. Alex_ontmoeting says:

    Hi. Please add the following fixes to your article.

    Installation interrupted problem – do not bother with drive letters. Simply start installation and after you receive a error – ignore it and manually copy missing files from DATA folder on Mortyr CD/image to you Mortyr Installation folder on your HDD.

    Noise issue – on modern systems some sounds (usually the ambient sounds) are distorted and very loud. In order to fix it you will have to use batch audio converter. You will need to convert all mortyr sound files from WAV to WAV. Be sure to set your output files settings to something like this:
    Channels: Mono
    Sample rate: original (if it doesn’t work – try 22050hz or lower)
    Sample size 16-bit
    You may have to experiment with those settings, because mortyr will reject sound files, if auido codecs aren’t compatible with game engine. Do not go very high – the lower – the more chance it’ll work.
    Please note that noise solution may not fix sound 100% – it will likely remove loud noise ambient glitch, however some minor sound glitches may still be present or even introduced. I don’t know, how to make this method work with “MAIN.HAL”
    versions of Mortyr btw.

  11. SCOTTufo says:

    I have the original manual. DirectX is 6.1 for this game

  12. Duke Muken says:

    Windows 7, 64 bits. Used the alternate installer since the original setup doesn’t run, and upon starting the game the CD-not-inserted error pops up, despite the cdrom.std already pointing to the game folder in the computer. Suggestions?

  13. Jedi One says:

    Hi there. I just followed all the instructions on the dgvoodoo wrapper and even have RivaTuner to set the FPS down to 30. I’m on a Win 10 laptop with a RTX 2070 Super.
    I have the original Mirage Media Mortyr 2093-1944 CD, got an external CD/DVD drive, set everything like the instructions said and when I click the mortyr.exe icon the game asked me to run as an admin and I set it to do that. Then I click the exe again and it does nothing, the CD in the drive doesn’t run or anything! Why doesn’t the game boot up at all? No errors or anything either, I click the exe file and…nothing!
    Any help is appreciated.

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