Mech Commander 2 Performance video performance stutters

Question

I recently decided to try installing an old game, Mech Commander 2, and play though it a little bit on my basically modern gaming machine.

To my surprise, it played VERY slowly... graphics stuttered during the opening movies and menus.

Why is this old game suffering on hardware that is literally thousands of times faster than was available at release... and how do I fix it?

Answer 1

Turns out that Mech Commander appears to have hardcoded in a preference for video cards that were current at the time.

The solution is to go into the install directory and delete the two files involved in this:

badcard.csv
vidcard.csv

After removing those, performance increases to what you would expect.