System Shock 1, quite simply, refuses to work in any flavour of NT. In any case, System Shock 2 does an excellent job of giving you the background on what happened in SS1. Basically, it goes as follows: "In 2072, a rogue AI known as Shodan lost her mind. In her limitless imagination, Shodan saw herself as a goddess, destined to inherit the earth. That image was snuffed out by the hacker who created her." System Shock 2 takes place 40 years later on the spaceship Von Braun.

thanks for your reply.

I guess I missed the boat and should have played the game when it came out. Sad thing is now all of my old games will probably not work just as system shock wont work. From what I'm seeing the game will almost work if it werent for the Dos4gw memory manager not working under NT. Kind of reminds me of the days of old where you had a boot disk for almost every different game as each had different memory requirements and to keep the memory free could only load what was needed.

Oh well, I haven't given up hope! My girlfriend has a Windows ME machine and I believe system shock could work on it! The local Electronics Boutique is selling System Shock 2 in the EA Classics box for $12.00 is that about right for pricing? I was wanting to purchase Dungeon Siege and Morrowind this month so I have to watch every bit of cash I can! Once again thanks for your help with this and all other old gaming matters.

Once you get the final patch for System Shock 2 (available at Patches Scrolls) you should have no problem running it on 2000/XP. It's most definitely worth the $12. Anyone that says otherwise can go stick their head in an oven and roast for a while. The problem with System Shock 1 isn't that it uses a DOS extender (other programs work fine with extenders). The problem is that (it at least thinks that) it runs out of FILES space for "email cursor" no matter how high you set FILES. This is a fatal error.

There are a couple other threads regarding System Shock here on VOGONS -- do a quick search to find them.

Cheers!

TTLG is an excellent site for everything relating to Looking Glass Studios games (and Deus Ex). I have browsed their forums extensively for the miracle cure that will get SS1 running in 2K/XP, and it always, invariably involves dual booting with 9x or DOS.

I, recently, chose to dual boot MS-DOS 6.22 for the sole purpose of getting Shock running. When I upgraded to XP, the fact that Shock did not work was almost enough to make me downgrade... almost.

As you can tell, I'm a pretty die-hard Shock 1 fan...

As to the possibility of getting shock working in XP; I seriously doubt it will work ever. Nothing whatsoever seems to fix the problem.

This is why I took the drastic route of dual booting MS-DOS, and I have hit a problem:

I cannot configure my SB Audigy card for the game, and thus, I cannot get sound! I've been looking everywhere for some sort of DOS or generic sound driver or some sort of emulator for DOS, but I have had no luck.

Anyone have any ideas on this one?

Connectix Virtual PC....but the sound will suck.

Yeah... Creative Labs stopped making DOS drivers for their cards after the SBLive!. Sorry!

Okay, I may have found a fix on my own:

There is a soundblaster 16 emulation program included on the Audigy driver CD (\DOSDrv) which installs some drivers.

The install would not allow me to install in XP, so I decided to go ahead and fool it into thinking it's in 9x by placing it in compatability mode. The install went through, and there's an interesting text file included with the drivers set.

I was sure to instal it on my FAT16 drive, and I'll probably modify autoexec.bat to load it at boot.

Anyway, I'll post the results of this experiment when I have some to report.

mendaliv wrote:

I have browsed their forums extensively for the miracle cure that will get SS1 running in 2K/XP, and it always, invariably involves dual booting with 9x or DOS. This actually works as a universal safety net for titles that just don't work right on an NT-based OS.

That's the best option for now. Don't forget The System Shock Hack Project at:
http://madeira.physiol.ucl.ac.uk/tsshp/sshock.html

I cannot configure my SB Audigy card for the game, and thus, I cannot get sound! I've been looking everywhere for some sort of DOS or generic sound driver...

If there is true-DOS driver support, that should've come with the card itself.

...or some sort of emulator for DOS, but I have had no luck....

DosBox is out there, but it's only up to unprotected 386-level at present.

Yeah, I tried TSSHP a while back; definately a valiant effort on the parts of the programmers, but it really does not cut it yet.

I guess what I'm looking for is some generic audio driver or sound card emulator that I'd load at autoexec.bat or config.sys (kinda like some of those generic ATAPI CD-ROM drivers, oakcdrom.sys or whatever it's called, for example, but for sound cards. I do realize that I'm talking about two entirely different technologies, standards, buses, and purposes.)

As I said, I'd found some sort of SB 16 emulator on the Audigy install CD. It hasn't worked, but I'm not going to let that stop me just yet. And if all else fails, I think a friend of mine has a Live! card; maybe the drivers are interchangable... If that doesn't work, I'll call it quits, try to install 98SE, and see how it goes from there.

mendaliv wrote:

..., but it really does not cut it yet.

His last update was August, so I'd say it's still one to keep an eye on...

As I said, I'd found some sort of SB 16 emulator on the Audigy install CD. It hasn't worked,...

You're not trying to use the Audigy with DOS6 (or earlier) are you? I'm pretty sure you need Win9x at the least...

..., a Live! card; maybe the drivers are interchangable...

They aren't. You need Audigy-specific drivers.

... install 98SE, and see how it goes from there.

A Dual-Boot between 98SE and 2K or XP is your best bet. Some games *cough*BUILD*cough* are just pigs to run on 2K/XP, but run fine on 9x.

Yeah, I'm trying MS-DOS 6.22... Crap...

Heh, yeah, those pesky version numbers are killers.
Wonder if there's a way to filter off all of Windows 95 and just be left with MS-DOS 7...hmm...

Hey all,

I tried valiantly to get SS1 to run under xp. I downloaded a demo copy of virtual PC and never could get things to work right (I dont have a copy of ms-dos around here (that i can find anyway) and i cant find the damn cd case with the win95 code.

Ultimately, I went out and bought SS2 and Oni for 20 bucks total at the local EB. I finished SS2 around the beginning of this month after 25 hours according to the savegames (which werent really accurate as i prob spent atleast 1 or 2 hours total outside of saves). Man that was an incredible game! My girlfriend watched me play for the most part just so she could hear the storyline through the logs! I truly felt I was all alone on a ship in the middle of no where throughout the entire game, it combined isolation and paranoia beautifully.

Oni on the other hand was a truly different beast. I know this is off-topic, but man that game's savegame system really shot itself in the foot. After playing a part of the airport mission multiple times in a row and spending about 2 hours which wasnt being saved, i got fed up with the game and have put it on the shelf. Such a waste of good talent, good music, and what could be a great game.

Anyways, I have been watching the hack project and will probably use that to play SS1. If anyone else comes up with some good ideas to get it to work on XP without dual booting (damn Microsoft and their CD codes and damn me for having my win95 and win98 disks in a caselogic binder without the codes!)

Best of luck

Nate

Well, I've been going nuts for the past couple hours trying everything I could possibly think to implement that SB 16 emulation and got it to 'theoretically' work.

The 'theoretically' comes in when I run a testing EXE that came with the set. It does 8 and 16 bit voice playback on left, right, and both channels, and also does MIDI playback on all channels.

The problem? When I go to run cdshock.bat to get the game going, one of two things happen:

1. If I had run that testing program on the same boot, the cursor starts shooting diagonally across the screen and my printer starts printing out the screen.

2. Otherwise, the executable will lock up at the prompt (right before starting DOS/4GW), give a "Divide overflow" error and lock up at the prompt (right before starting DOS/4GW), or in one instance, EMM386 halted my machine with an error #12 (wow, non-hex error codes... this is REALLY oldschool 😜)

Going into autoexec.bat and REMing out the calls which load the emulator allows the game to run, but, of course, without any sound. The same problem occurs with the installer/setup program.

I've tried many different IRQ and DMA settings, but I've not tried changing the ports yet... I'll have to try that next.

I'll post the way I did this in the morning; I'm way too tired to organize my thoughts on how I managed to do it right now.

I don't mean to be rude, but though System Shock 2 was good, System Shock 1 was far superior in everything except graphics quality.

Anyway, I'm beginning work on compiling the process I used to get SB 16 emulation to theoretically work... Shouldn't take more than an hour.

Okay, I've finished typing up how to duplicate my results. I've attached the file to this post.

I just read your file. Were you able to get other games working with sound?

I only tried installing X-Com Apocalypse (another game I'd like to play). If sbeinit.com was loaded, the installer would crash. I believe it's some sort of conflict with EMM386, which the emulator requires to be enabled in order to run. It does not require expanded memory, it just requires that EMM386 be "ON."

Oddly enough, the installer crashed differently when I gave EMM386 the "NOEMS" command. In one instance, the computer would automatically reboot when the installer checked extended memory, in another, it would outright crash.

I think it's time to start scientifically documenting what is going on..

That makes me verrrry suspicious. Make sure you're not trying to load SBEINIT in himem. That always crashed my system, although in a distinctly different manner.

This is a neat little project. Good work, and keep at it...