Mecc story category
Sure, I'm gonna add new categories.
The unofficial patch adds many changes with balancing multiplayer in mind, I'm afraid it might be incomparable to the official release. If you have any runs done on 1.497 feel free to submit them, if it's too different I'll make it a new category.
As for running 1.4 try copying gg_dx8r.dll from 1.497 (or Geforce 3 release) to 1.4's directory and renaming it to gg_dx7r.dll - move the original one somewhere else. If it still doesn't work let me know what error messages do you get etc., maybe something can be done with that.