[SS1] Cannot kill Shodan in cyberspace

Landsknecht on 17/1/2010 at 10:34

After I reach the Shodan's chamber in cyberspace, my screen was filled with Shodan's face in less then 5 seconds. Is seems to me that it is much more faster then when I played SS1 before (about 10 years ago). Is it possible, that it depends on computer speed or I'm getting too old for such things? Or do you know how many pulser hits (version 8) I need to destroy her when cyberspace difficulty is level 2?

I have SS1 portable v0.9 on dual core mashine and I have no other problems during all the game.

Thanks for your help.

Nameless Voice on 17/1/2010 at 14:28

Yes, pretty much. If you want to be able to defeat her, run some CPU-intensive programs in the background before running SS1. DromEd / ShockEd is a good candidate, or some sort of CPU benchmark.

Landsknecht on 18/1/2010 at 07:04

Hmm... Thanks but that doesn't work. I tried to run two CPU hungry programs (one for each core) and the CPU load reached 100%. Then I ran SS1. The game was not smooth, but was playable (like on some 486 computer). But Shodan was as fast as usual... Well, it takes one or two seconds more to fill the screen, but in some moments I cannot move too due to game slowness, so it is nearly the same as before.

steo on 21/1/2010 at 22:04

What CPU hungry programs are you running? I managed it on a 3GHz dual core with just running (http://www.overclock.net/downloads/138142-orthos.html) Orthos in the background. Bearing that in mind, it still took quite a few attempts.

D'Arcy on 22/1/2010 at 04:39

I only got rid of that problem when I started playing the game on DOSBox.

steo on 23/1/2010 at 17:23

Another thought: you could try running the game in a virtual machine, that way you could adjust exactly how much power the game was allowed to use. Unless there's problems getting the sound/video to work in the VM, this seems like an ideal solution.

Nameless Voice on 23/1/2010 at 21:59

Quote Posted by steo

I tried that, and never had any luck getting it to work properly in any of the virtual machine software. VMWare and VirtualPC couldn't support the midi properly, and DOSBox was too slow on my computer to run at 1024x768. Which, um, is exactly what the OP wanted, so maybe they should run in DOSBox?

Landsknecht on 24/1/2010 at 21:06

I got it! On the first attempt!

The solution is:

If you have SS1 portable version, do NOT use "SSP.exe" in your installation directory.
Use "RES\cdshock.exe" instead.

I only realized, that mouse move was very slow for normal game, but it is no problem when you only need to kill Shodan. I only moved cursor in the middle of the screen and with moving and targeting with cursor keys and firing with ENTER it was easy.

Thanks for your ideas for bringing me to the right way.