Be Excellent To Each Other

System Shock 1 is cursed.

It is cursed because it refuses to run on any computer in the universe. I have tried them all.

I would very much like to be able to play System Shock 1; I have been trying to for years.

Somebody out here must know the secret to getting it to work.

Shock me, folks!

I last had it running on a Windows 98 machine. I think I was using DOSBOX back then, but I'm not certain.

This is true. Even since I ("acquired it legitimately" -Ed.) for the first time in 1997ish, I have been unable to ever get it running on any of the four PCs I've owned since then, DOSBox or otherwise (and this includes my Pentium Pro 180 and PII-400 which were both marvellously good at getting old stuff to run properly in proper DOS and everything - the PII runs Twilight 2000 perfectly)

I recently managed to get Fragile Allegiance working on DOSbox after trying about 7 different configurations in an effort to make it work with both sound and music.

A shame that some of PC gaming's greatest games came out during that awkward period from 1991-1996 where graphics and sound improved immensely, but only if you were prepared to have a stack of boot disks to hand for each one. Of particular evilness were the ones that were XMS only, like Zone 66 and Comanche.

What narks me more than anything is that these bastard developers, those big ones that still exist, refuse to release patches for even legendary classic games for modern operating systems. Only now, with the release of Command and Conquer: The First Decade, does Red Alert run in WindowsXP. Prior to that it was some third party release that sort of made it work. boo-urns.

Or they cunt it up spectacularly.

Lucasarts did the X-Wing Collector's Edition. A naff title for what is in fact a DVD case containing hours of delight: the original X-Wing (and both add on disks) and the original TIE Fighter (with the add on disk) fully remastered with full speech and running in the high res, fully textured X-Wing vs TIE Fighter engine.

The greatest thing ever, potentially, except it only like Windows 95 and Windows 98, and you need a tricky-to-use (registry editing) fan-made patch to get it to work under Windows 2000 or XP.

You only needed 3 boot disks to run any game, from memory.

I've got it running before, thoug hwithout sound. I think it was under DOSbox. It was jerky though, and had that horrible "click on left arrow to move left" control system that ruined almost every RPG ever before about 2000. I think, anyway.

Except Ultima VII.

I've heard System Shock Portable works quite well, though I haven't tried it out yet.

http://www.strangebedfellows.de/index.php/topic,211.0.html

Well, I suppose... I had one that was all EMS, one that was all XMS, and one that filled a generic middle ground for less fussy games. But I also had to hold down CTRL (was it CTRL? Or an F-key?) while starting up to say YES or NO to certain drivers for a few games, even with the disks.

And that's before things that needed the above PLUS 600k base memory free.

And yes, Ultima VII, with the dreaded 'Voodoo' memory manager.

Whomever you are, you enigmatically named person - cheers! That's just put a HUGE smile on my face, I've been after some kind of excellent, older PC game to play on my slow work laptop, and this fits the bill perfectly.

That sounds horribly complicated. We jut had a menu appear on bootup asking which configuration we wanted, and loaded that. No floppies involved at all.



And to be fair, it wasn't exactly easy for Origin to make a 32bit memory manager ontop of a 16bit OS, and with tools designed for 16bit use (the borland compiler didn't understand 32bit pointers, for a start)

See, you can do that with your autoexec.bat, but not with your config.sys, if I recall correctly.

I can't remember - my brother set it all up, but it did manage to run every game we had with no problems (and only 8 options to choose from)

I was also a fan of the boot menu - I used to have five options, which covered everything I ever met:

1. As much base memory as poss
2. EMS, no CD
3. XMS, no CD
4. EMS, CD drivers
5. XMS, CD drivers

There was definitely some way of controlling Config.sys bits and bobs - possibly by using autoexec.bat to copy a predefined template over the main config.sys, I can't remember.

Must... resist... urge... to play System Shock through again.

It always worked in XP. The only thing that failed was the installer checked for NT. Either install it under 98 or run it in compatibility mode and it's always worked.

choice

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archiv ... x?mfr=true

With some PC games I probably spent more time trying to get the bloody things to run than actually playing them. In the case of one of the Tie Fighter games, despite various attempts with boot disks, I never managed to play it.

I think you need everything off for that, but just some vmm loaded.

Malc

Awesome days of old.

I seem to recall back in the days of installing Windows98 you had to boot into dos and run something critical before starting the installation or it would be 400 times slower than normal. Some kind of CD command or something. ms_atapi, or something? Sounds familiar.

The old days where minutiae knowledge of this stuff was king. I miss that.

Wasn't it the disk caching stuff, can't remember what it was called. Part of me wants to say drivespace (or drivespc), but wasn't that program that magically turned your 500mb hard drive into something bigger?

Edit - SmartDrv, thanks wikipedia.

I think most of the problems I had was getting CDROM support from a boot disk using something like MSCDEX maybe?

Microsoft CD Extension or something? Oh god, the nightmares are all coming back.
Not enough memory to run this program, you need 635k memory.

mscdex.exe, that sounds about right

Yeah, MSCDEX was a bitch as you needed it for CD games but it ate memory.

I remember I had a brilliant configuration going with DOS 5.0, and nothing gave me grief. Unfortunately, my dad was suckered in by the hype around DOS 6.0 (I remember going to a computer show at the time and seeing people walking around in 'Wow! Twice the space on my disk!' t-shirts) and bought DOS 6.0 and immediately ran DoubleSpace. Except... as we all know, DoubleSpace was shit in 6.0. It used a ton of memory, it didn't really double the amount of space (we got about 60% more) and in spite of the fact that it was HIS computer and HE was in charge of making the (stupid) decisions about it, when all our data got corrupted it was down to ME (as I actually knew what I was doing) to painstakingly rescue as much as possible onto floppies before reformatting. Things didn't get better until 6.22. Memmaker was a great thing, though.

I seem to recall I used the sound recorder that came with our SoundBlaster to record a little blues number (complete with harmonica) entitled "I'm so sick... about DOS 6" to ease my pain that none of my games worked any more.

IRQ 7 DMA 1

AAARRRRGGGH

Bloody hell - that brings back memories! It was F8 on my old 486DX2, I think.
I had all those Yes and No responses memorised, depending on which game I wanted to play.

System Shock was a lovely game - one of the first enhanced CD games I bought, with all the speech and stuff. The only naff parts I can remember were the horrible Cyberspace bits, but you could just whack the difficulty down and breeze through them in no time.

Yeah, it was F8. I wasn't sure. Zone 66 I remember I used my Comanche XMS-only boot disk and then said no to practically everything... it was worth it, though.

I remember dribbling over the rendered info screen in Comanche, which rotated around your helicopter in an impressively cluttered pre-rendered hangar. My friend and I both dribbled with amazement and remarked that 'one day, all games will look that good'. And they do, now.

There's nothing quite like QEMM. (And Quarterdeck Quickboot)

Oh, QEMM was fantastic.

To those of you who had trouble with the game under DOSBox - did you try the latest version (0.72)? Or indeed the rather ace CVS-build-spinoff by ykhwong?

I've just been playing System Shock!

It's mighty sophisticated stuff. Don't think I could stand to look at it for any length of time though. :/

Yeah... with those blocky graphics it looks more like a 'Lego' world than the quasi-realistic landscapes with random Lego parts scattered around of Lego Inbanana Jones.

Seven year Necromance!

System Shock 1 is getting remade!

http://www.polygon.com/2015/11/25/98014 ... t-look-art

goodnewseverybody.gif

Nice!