How to Run System Shock 1 on Windows 2000/XP FAQ v 1.0

TheNightTerror on 28/10/2005 at 08:35

When you were doing the sound check while installing SS1, did you get any digital sound?

diamond2a on 31/10/2005 at 06:40

Does anyone else get the sounds from the opening movie playing but only see a black screen with a cursor, I think i have tried every combination of everything and this is the only product i can get, i have XP SP2 and really want to play SS1, i own the CD version

duelists on 13/11/2005 at 07:12

Hi

I have just installed SS1 on my Win 2K machine folling the FAQ direction to the letter and can run and interact with the game no probs. The only issue I have encountered is that the MIDI music is really slow and clunky. The digital sound appears fine though.

When I first installe dthe game and set my sound card up using VDMS, the MIDI option was the only one that would return good test music.

I noticed taht the slowing of the music occured after I setup the CDSHOCK.BAT file for running with VDMS.

Any thoughts out there on what I might need to do. The game plays fine so I might just have to live with it.

Cheers

ToxicFrog on 14/11/2005 at 14:47

@diamond2a: try switching between SVGA and MCGA cutscenes in the installer, perhaps? If you can't get the cutscenes working in game, you can always download and play them seperately (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=101611) here.

@duelists: try turning on Performance->Try To Reduce CPU Usage and set it to Low in the properties for the VDMS shortcut. I had the same issue and this helped a lot, although I think it still plays slightly slower than it should.

duelists on 17/11/2005 at 12:23

Toxic Frog

Thanks for the tip. Sound works a treat now. All I have to figure out now is how to get the menu screen to display upon startup.. My version goes to a balck screen with the menu music playing. As long as I can remember the key strokes to load my last saved game, it then starts to work.
Thanks Again:D

hunvagy on 20/12/2005 at 10:50

well it did start up, managed to cut down on the slow-downs, but still there's one question I'd like to ask. Why is it, that in the sound config window the MIDI playback is flawless, but as soon as I start up the game, it reduces to some pre-PC Speaker jingles? ^^" Also what would be the specs to run it with VDMS?
It is fairly choppy sometimes on this config:

AMD Sempron2600+
512 Megz of RAM
Sapphire Radeon 9600XT
Windows XP Professional

And sometimes the mouse cursor just dissapears.

Thanks for any help you can give

Anhaedra on 20/12/2005 at 18:18

Ok, I followed the instructions, but when I try to launch the CDSHOCK VDMSound shortcut, I get a fullscreen dos window that quickly goes back to a normal window that says something about mouse2kv_v01, and just sits there. I have NOLFB.COM, MOUSE2KV.EXE, and the CDSHOCK.exe 2K/XP patch. My System Shock directory is in C:\SSHOCK, and my cdshock.bat file contains the following:

Quote:

@echo off
C:\SSHOCK\NOLFB.COM
C:\sshock\MOUSE2KV.EXE 640 480 8 8 C:\SSHOCK\dos4gw.exe cdshock.exe

Here's a screenshot of the properties menu of my CDSHOCK.EXE

(http://img315.imageshack.us/img315/1021/cdshockexeprops0gh.jpg)

And of my CDSHOCK VDMSound shortcut

(http://img315.imageshack.us/img315/9775/cdshockvdmproperties0hh.jpg)

And the window it hangs at

(http://img280.imageshack.us/img280/3999/dosprompt4fw.jpg)

Can anyone tell me what I did wrong? Thanks.

The Brain on 21/12/2005 at 00:08

Anhaedra, remove NOLFB.COM from your cdshock.bat and try then to run it.

Anhaedra on 21/12/2005 at 03:40

I removed NOLFB, but it still did the same thing... :(

Sypha Nadon on 21/12/2005 at 17:31

Okay, I think I may need a little help with this one. Recently, I got a copy of System Shock on eBay, brand new, factory sealed and everything. For the most part, I've been able to install most of my old games on my new computer without much hassle (my new computer being a Hewlett Packard with a 530J Intel Pentium 4 Processor, ATI Radeon x300 SE, and so forth). However, when I scanned the booklet that came with the game and saw that they had more pages dealing with how to install the game and troubleshooting then they did on actually playing the game, I knew this would be a tough nut to crack, a feeling that was confirmed when I came here and read the first post on this thread. I have a few basic questions that maybe will help me get started. If these questions seem stupid, let me just say that I've only ever used Windows 98 and Windows XP... Thus, when it comes to stuff like DOS, I'm totally clueless, having never really used those programs all that much before.

Okay, I began by downloading all those programs the first post suggested. The NOLFB.exe, the MOUSE2KV.exe, VDM Sound, the XP patch. However, I couldn't find any downloads on the link for Dos4gw.exe, so I had to goggle that and download it from another site. Once all those were installed and unzipped, I tried to install the game, as the first post suggested. Next, I placed the extracted nolfb.exe, mouse2kv.exe, and the patch in the SS2 main directory (I'm assuming that the "main directory" is the SSHOCK folder that appeared in my C drive. That folder has programs like GEN, DATA, SOUND, CDSHOCK, INSTALL, SSHOCK, and so forth). So far, so good.

Here's where I ran into my first problem. The instructions stated that when one extracts the Dos4gw.exe, it should give them a list of different versions to select, and that one should probably choose 1_97. However, whenever I run it, all I get is a black screen with a white cursor that I presume to be a DOS screen. This screen stays on my monitor for about ten seconds before it just vanishes (this seems to happen to some of the other above programs I installed... the reason for this, I am unsure).

Now, the CDShock.bat file... I see something in my directory called the CDSHOCK MS-DOS Batch File (1KB). Is this what you mean by that? When I go to edit it, I see these words in notepad:

@echo off
F:\cdrom\cdshock.exe

After reading some of the other comments here, I realize that I'm supposed to add stuff to this, no? Such as, for example, "C:\SSHOCK\CDSHOCK.EXE\NOLFB.exe" and so forth, and that I'm supposed to do this for NOLFB, mouse2KV, and Dos4gw.exe.

Anyway, I tried doing steps 8 and 9, though I had trouble with the System Shock 1 patch at first... it was a rar file, so I had to download something called winrar (phew!) and install that, which let me use it as an .exe. Obviously I knew nothing would work until I could solve my dos4gw.exe issues and edit the .bat file properly, but I was just practicing what I had to do for the future.

One final issue of interest: When I try to play the game through the VDM Sound shortcut, I get an error message with the headline "16 bit MS_DOS subsystem" and the following text: "VDMS Launchpad- CDSHOCK... The system cannot open Com1 Port requested by the application. Choose "Close" to terminate the application). A few other people on here seemed to have this problem, but it was kind of vague how they solved it... Something about BIOS or along those lines? Any help in this area or any of the above questions would be appreciated.