philscomputerlab wrote:

The speed / timing related bug that can cause the final boss to become unbeatable, is this something the DOS version also experiences when played on a fast computer?

Yes.

It has to do with the fact that the pixels are drawn in and timed by frames, not by time, so the higher your framerate, the less time you have to beat the boss. However, you can catch yourself a break by increasing the screen resolution and thus dropping the framerate on real hardware, not to mention making it take more pixels to draw everything in, or emulated in DOSBox, just set a fixed cycles count and endure having a lower framerate for the final part. :P

Ah good to know. On my PC a cycle speed of 30k seems to work well for 320 x 200 and 100k for 640 x 480. I'm working on a tweak guide for this game 😀

philscomputerlab wrote:

Ah good to know. On my PC a cycle speed of 30k seems to work well for 320 x 200 and 100k for 640 x 480. I'm working on a tweak guide for this game :)

Don't forget to do 320x400 and 640x400 as well! I find those resolutions look MUCH better than 640x480 thanks to the lack of aliasing. :B

If memory serves though, the "max" setting is the way to go for most of the game. In fact, even on a powerful system running at 640x400, SHODAN can be beaten extremely quickly if you have the best Pulser, a steady hand, great aim, and just burn into her with some extreme rapid fire.

Funny thing too, System Shock 2 actually had its own unique framerate issue as well for a period of time. It was never designed to go faster than 60 FPS so if the framerate goes above 60, rather than the game running properly at the higher rate, everything goes faster. On the video cards of the time when it was new, this was a non-issue 'cause none of them were powerful enough to do this. On newer, more powerful cards with CRTs syncing at rates much higher than 60, this suddenly created a world of difference, but then when LCDs became the norm and 60 Hz was again normal, this issue went away again thanks to vsyncing at 60 FPS.