The version incompatibility should be able to be rectified.
I’m guessing your issue is similar to this one:
If so, you should be able to migrate the model.
Though the code to do so was released in medcat v1.8.0.
So what I would do is the following:
# you might want to do this in another virtual environment in order to avoid messing with the one that otherwise works for you
# or you can just do this on another machine and transfer the model later
# install medcat 1.8
python -m pip install medcat==1.8.2
# do the conversion
python -m medcat.utils.versioning fix-config <model_pack_path> <new_model_pack_path>
Now you should have a new model that should work with medcat 1.7 (there’s nothing that changed between 1.7 and 1.8 in that regard).