Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> Mantis targets 64-bit Windows systems and requires .NET 8 or higher to run.

So, it won't work on the same retro PC as the game.



In my experience it was not that hard (as far as 25 year old games go) to get running on a Windows 10 system, which is what I played MC1 on and made Mantis on. I wrote down the steps I used[1] but there are alternative approaches using e.g., dgVoodoo which are not hard to find if you search for them. As far as I'm aware there's no need to use a retro system to reliably run MC1.

If you are for some reason intent on playing MC1 on a retro rather than modern system, Mantis is just a glorified automated hex editor and you can byte-for-byte replicate what it does to the game exe by copy-pasting the hex edits which are already outlined in the OP (for the bug fixes) and elsewhere (for the rest of what Mantis does).

---

[1] https://mhloppy.com/2026/04/mechcommander-windows-10-without...


I was just noticing that there was a whole lot of work fixing these minor bugs, and then went all lazy writing the patch... Or maybe I was spoiled by decades of scene patches, cracks and tiny demos with chiptune music and funny graphics.


There is a certain irony I guess, but in my eyes the "patch" is the hex edits, not Mantis. If I had published these fixes but never gone back and made Mantis, I would still have considered the work "complete".

Mantis was made nearly one month after the actual patching was done partly as an excuse to test out a few things like the build settings available in newer .NET releases (e.g., framework-dependent vs self-contained build with trimming, JIT vs AoT vs ReadyToRun compilation). It wasn't really laziness to target .NET 8 because exploring those build options made it take longer than just building using e.g., .NET Framework since Mantis is so basic. As I said, glorified automated hex editor.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2026 batch! Applications are open till July 27.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: