Shock to the System

Bored this evening so I decided I was going to get System Shock running, somehow, on my main machine. It's an old DOS game so it wasn't just going to run without some fiddling. It's hard enough to get them running on Windows, let alone Linux.

System Shock was way ahead of it's time and it has many decent features. It ran nicely on my Pentium 100mhz machine with 48mb RAM but it couldn't handle the 640x480 mode very well if I remember right. I always used to turn the combat off as I preferred to just go through the storyline and puzzles. I never played System Shock 2 but they went on to develop BioShock, which shares many characteristics with the old games and is just as good.

First I put DOSBox on which lets you run many DOS games on Windows or Linux, but the System Shock installer complained and wouldn't run, saying it needed to be run from the CD.

After that, I created a VMWare machine with 32mb RAM and a 400mb hard drive and installed DOS from a Windows 98 boot disk. After quite a bit of fiddling, it worked, but while the game ran pretty much perfectly, I couldn't get it to produce any sound. VMWare sound emulation is pretty minimal and doesn't seem to work under DOS at all. Then again this is the server version so you might expect that but from what I've read the workstation version isn't great either.

After another go in DOSBox, I was able to trick the installer to get it to install and run and it actually isn't bad. It stutters every now and again especially in the Cyberspace sequences. I might try it on one of the sub-1ghz laptops I have knocking about.

There was a particularly unpleasant experience in work this morning. Had to move a user's PC away from a desk where the roof had leaked. It smelled absolutely disgusting, like someone had puked there. Incredibly the guy didn't want his PC moved as he didn't see the point, seemingly immune to the stench.