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Metal Fatigue


Genre: Real Time Strategy
Release Year: 2000
Developer: Zono Inc
Publisher: Psygnosis
Age Rating: 12+
Playability Status: Perfect
Tested On: Windows 10 x64
Availability: Copyright retained - Out of print/unavailable

There’s an unwritten rule in Japanese science fiction, add a giant mecha suit (think robots, but with human pilots) into the mix and everything is ten times better. Metal Fatigue takes this approach with the RTS genre, allowing you to construct giant stomping power suits to dominate the battlefield. Apart from that, your various war machines will also fight battles on three different planes; in the sky, on the ground and underground too.

Installation

While the game appears to have a 32 bit installation program, we were not able to get the game to install on our Windows 10 machine at all. The installer would start and then simply freeze before doing anything. Firing up our Windows XP virtual machine, we had no problems installing the game under the older operating system. In the end we decided to write a replacement installer. This installer will copy the files from both game CD-ROMs, create the required registry keys and also install two important patches. You can download the replacement installer here (link broken? Let me know here). Even if you are able to run the games original installer, we recommend using our replacement installer, as it will take care of putting the game into 3DFX mode for you. The reason for this is explained in the next section.

After installation there are still a few other things you will need to do in order to play the game, so read on before attempting to start the game.

Playing the game

Metal Fatigue is a little unusual in that it supports not only DirectX but also OpenGL and Glide video modes too. Modern PCs support DirectX and OpenGL video modes, while Glide is a relic from the days of the 3DFX video cards. You might expect that to get the game working, all you need to do is use either DirectX or OpenGL mode. However, neither of these modes would work on our Windows 10 PC. Instead, the solution to getting this game working is to use a Glide wrapper. This is special software that converts old Glide games to run on DirectX graphics cards. There are two different Glide wrappers you can use with this game:-

If you have an older PC, use nGlide. nGlide is a Glide to DirectX9 wrapper program. If you have an older PC that can’t support DirectX11, use nGlide. Using nGlide is really easy, simply install it and then run your 3DFX compatible game.

If you have a more recent PC, use dgVoodoo2. dgVoodoo2 is a glide (and DirectX 1 to 7) to DirectX11 wrapper. It’s one of the most useful tools for getting old games running again on modern hardware. Using dgVoodoo2 is also really easy, see our tutorial here.

In order to make it past the title screen, you must have installed your preferred Glide wrapper and also put the game into 3DFX mode. Our replacement installer takes care of this for you, so as long as your glide wrappers are installed correctly, the game should now start.

Restoring music

Like many CD-ROM based games, Metal Fatigue had a number of CD audio tracks on the disc that would play during gameplay. Due to some changes in the way Windows handles CD audio, the games soundtrack no longer plays on more modern versions of Windows. To fix this problem, our replacement installer includes a patch that re-directs the audio to play MP3 files instead of CD audio. For this patch to work, you need to install the _inmm.dll software package. You only need to install _inmm.dll in this instance. Our replacement installer has taken care of everything else so as long as you have _inmm.dll installed, you’re good to go. While _inmm.dll should fix the majority of music playback problems with the game, there were a number of times when the music appeared to stop looping or played in the wrong place, but for the most part the soundtrack worked correctly.

Patching

We were not able to find any official patches for the game. Over on the nGlide home page, there’s an unofficial patch that uses Microsoft’s own Application Compatibility Toolkit and simply tells Windows to lie to the game about how much memory is free. Our replacement installer takes care of installing this patch for you, so there’s no need to download and install it manually.

With patches, your chosen glide wrapper and the _inmm.dll software installed, you’re now ready to play.

Tweaking visual quality

The game has a number of visual quality settings you can change. Start the game and from the main menu, choose “Options”. The following options will then be displayed.

 

metal-fatigue-options

 

Metal Fatigue does not support widescreen screen modes at all, so you will need to choose the resolution from the list on the left that most closely matches your monitor. 1600×1200 isn’t a great fit for a 1080p panel, for instance, so don’t be surprised if things don’t look so good at that resolution. Don’t be afraid to try one or two options here, you may find that the higher resolutions result in graphics that are too small to see, particularly if you’re gaming on your HDTV rather than at a monitor.

On the right there are some other quality options. Since this is an old game, you can turn all the options on and enjoy the best visual quality even on a relatively modest modern PC. The options at the bottom middle can be set to taste. Remember to click on “OK” when you are done, then you’re ready to play.

Troubleshooting

Problems saving games – Like many old titles, Metal Fatigue saves its game data into the same folder as the game itself (in the Save sub-folder). If you install the game to the default folder (under c:\program files) then, this will usually mean that save games and configuration files cannot be written. To solve this problem you can either run the game as administrator (right click on the games icon and choose “Run as administrator”) or, better still, set the permissions on your game folder so that your user account has full control/read write permissions. You can find a tutorial on how to configure folder permissions here.

Screenshots

Click on any screenshot to enlarge it.

metal-fatigue-1 metal-fatigue-2

22 comments

  1. Garrett says:

    Awesome guide for an awesome game, thanks so much for compiling this information here! I was able to install the game, with fonts, sounds, etc. but whenever I click to start a new campaign or skirmish, it tells me I need to insert a disk… Any ideas what is going wrong (I have the virtual disks (1&2) mounted on separate drives).

    Thanks!

  2. Dan says:

    Doesn’t work :( Game crashes after few minutes ;((

  3. cacho says:

    Output folder: C:\Program Files (x86)\Psygnosis\Metal Fatigue
    I can’t find the Metal Fatigue CD!
    helpp

  4. Dan says:

    Same problem as Garrett. Do the mods even respond to these comments?

  5. mohrad says:

    I got it working on Win10+gVoodo2 but it keeps freezing/hanging/locking up.
    When it does so, the cursor stops responding both in-game and windows (except ONLY the screen you see when you press Alt+Ctrl+Del) forcing me to keyboard my way to task mngr and kill the process.
    I’ve tried every combination of options at gVoodo2, I did try other Glide wrappers too.

    Worst thing is, there is no Events logged in the Windows EventView… One time when MF locked up and I tried to kill it “in-blind” (was on fullscreen, so all I could see was blackness) I messed it up and instead of killing it a window poped saying the program ceased to respond and Windows will close it – afterwards I got Event logged which said the most generic thing of all – 0xC0000005 at ntdll.dll

    :(

  6. steve says:

    Thanks for the recommendation. I haven’t played this game for ages.

    One issue I did have is that it keeps asking me to insert a disc, even though I installed it through an .iso file and have it mounted. Any tips on solving this?

  7. daniel says:

    looks like this dosn’t work, just keeps on saying i have to insert the disc even though i have them both mounted

  8. Tiago Justo says:

    I cant save the game when i do skirmishes :/ Do you know anything about this?

  9. WTFCoop says:

    after installing nGlide105 drivers and turning off compatibility mode i managed to play for 6hrs with no issues. other then none of the videos working for campaign or launch video.
    i7 7700k
    Nvidia evga 1070sc
    16g ddr4 3000
    Gigabyte Aorus Gamming5

    game installed off Original disks not downloaded copy. think i have the box and manual somewhere.

  10. Greutel says:

    It worked, thanks a lot!
    Maybe you should mention in the description that you have to modify inmm.ini to point to the installation directory or else the game will run, but without music and inmm will produce annoying error sounds.
    Is there a way to change the language? I installed from german cd and all the Menus and most of the user interface are in english, however the speech and mission descriptions are german.

  11. jalo says:

    Game works perfectly except…no music and no videos. Are there some steps you forgot to mention regarding inmm?

  12. Gombi says:

    Thanks for the guide, unfortunatly it doesn’t work for me properly.
    The game freezes after a few minutes, and i don’t have ingame sounds, just the music. Any ideas what can couse the problem?

  13. Gen_Kazzum says:

    I just wanted to note I had no issue getting the game started however once I did have it started it kept throwing an error about being unable to find the audio files. Although I had redirected the installer to go to a certian drive the _IMNN.dll config file was redirected to “D:\games\…” (( sorry going from memory )).

    I just edited the .ini to look into the correct folder and the game started working just fine.

    That being said I used the dgVoodoo2 since I have a GTX960 graphics card and was fairly certian it would appreciate the higher direct X version being used. The only two configuration changes I made to Voodoo was to force it to use my graphics card instead of try to software emulate, and to full screen the game on my secondary display.

    I was pleasently suprised to find my antivirus did not activate on any of these files and also to find in total my game folder was 697MB even with the extra program jammed into it.

  14. Hellektronic says:

    A huge note, be absolutely sure to install the game Direct X even if you already have a higher version. It can cause the game to completely freeze after a bit of gameplay.

    • BuckoA51 says:

      It’s not possible to do that since Windows won’t allow you to install an old version of DirectX over a new one. The only way would be to copy the relevant directX dlls to the games folder.

      • Hellektronic says:

        That’s what I thought too, but I was having issues with crashing, even with dgvoodoo and the LAA patch. Once I ran the installer for the old Direct X version on the game disk, it stopped freezing and hasn’t done it ever since.

        I’m not sure if it’s a missing file or what, but it worked for me on Windows 10.

  15. Mozzelex says:

    FYI! It’s on Steam

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