First post, by Deep Thought
The original Splinter Cell is currently available for free on Uplay until mid-August.
This seems to be the same 1.3 version of the game that is distributed on GOG, so the bonus missions are included, but EAX Advanced HD (EAX3) is disabled, and the shadows do not display correctly on modern hardware by default.
Running on a modern PC:
1. Download and install the widescreen patch to support modern displays.
This also includes a fix to enable proper full-screen mode on Windows 10, even if you plan on running the game in 4:3.
Set Direct3D8DisableMaximizedWindowedModeShim to 1 in <game dir>\system\d3d8.ini
2. To fix the shadows, edit the game shortcut to launch with -shadowmode=projector
This does not restore the full quality shadows, but is currently the best option available on modern hardware.
I have not found a way to increase the shadow resolution beyond the in-game options.
3. Enable anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering if you have an NVIDIA GPU.
Download and run the latest build of NVIDIA Profile Inspector. Open up the "Splinter Cell" profile.
Set anti-aliasing compatibility to 0x00000040. You can just type this into the box.
Set anti-aliasing behavior flags to "None", anti-aliasing mode to "Override application setting" and select the level of anti-aliasing you want to use.
If you want to use super-sampling use the "SQ" options rather than the "transparency supersampling" options.
Set anisotropic filtering to "User-defined" and "16x"
V-Sync will be disabled by default. Personally I prefer to force this via the driver, and set the maximum pre-rendered frames to 1 to minimize input lag.
The profile should look something like this.
4. Enable EAX audio. If you have a Creative sound card, point ALchemy to the system folder inside the game directory.
Open <game dir>\system\SplinterCellUser.ini and set:
- Sound3DAcc=True
EAX=True
EAX_Capable=True
This will enable EAX in the game. However the EAX Advanced HD option (EAX3) will still be unavailable in the menu so I expect that the game is falling back to EAX2 support when you do this.
I purchased a cheap DVD version of the game off eBay and I found that by copying over certain DLL files, I was able to restore the EAX Advanced HD option in the Uplay version of the game - though this prevents you from playing the DLC maps. (game quits with an error)
However, I'm not sure whether the EAX3 functionality is fully restored by this. Does anyone know a good way to test it?
The pre-patched version of the game from the DVD constantly freezes on my PC and I can't even make it past the tutorial so I can't do a comparison between the two to see if they sound different at all. They don't appear to be any different from the limited testing that I was able to do.
I'm also wondering if anyone knows how to unlock all the levels in the game.
I've played through it many times before on the original Xbox when it was first released, but never on PC, and I just wanted access to all the levels for testing right now.