hreaper on 7/5/2007 at 15:36
Hi !
I'm stuck on level nine in System Shock 1. I solved the two wire puzzles in the south (autobomb maze) and in the east (sec2-bot maze). I know that the third puzzle is in the northern room with the diagonal slopes and the large pillar in the center but I don't know what to do there. My automap shows six enemy bots behind secret doors around the room but I don't know how to open them. There is a single opening with a button, but pressing it seems to do nothing at all...
Am I missing something or is this a bug?
Vigil on 7/5/2007 at 15:53
That button you can access should open one of the secret doors, which will contain another button that opens another secret door, and so on.
Alternately, I think you can bypass that stuff altogether by using your jump boots to get onto the pillar.
hreaper on 7/5/2007 at 16:12
Hmm. This is strange. If the button should open one of the doors, it sure does not work for me.
I can't jump on the pillar either. It goes all the way up to the ceiling. There's just a small ledge all around the pillar where I can jump on but I can't see any wire puzzle there.
This seems to be a bug of some kind. Possibly due to switching from the original to the CD version halfway through the game.
Is there a way to just walk through that force door? A cheat code or something?
Vigil on 7/5/2007 at 17:33
Not that I know of, and this does sound like a bug, but maybe you're overlooking something. Could you zip up the savegame file from where you are and email it to me? The savegames are in the DATA folder and named SAVGAM00.DAT, SAVGAM01.DAT etc. You can get my email address by clicking on my name and choosing "Send email to Vigil".
flexbuster on 7/5/2007 at 17:59
Are you sure that one of the doors around the perimeter of the room isn't open?
hreaper on 7/5/2007 at 23:17
@Vigil: mail's out
@flexbuster: I'm positive that none of the hidden doors have opened. I've been circling this damn room for quite some time because I thought that I overlooked some tiny switch or something. There is no opening except the one where I entered the room and the one with the button that doesn't work. If there were an open door I believe I should be able to see the opening on the automap, but it shows a solid wall on the three sides of the room where the doors should be.
Vigil on 8/5/2007 at 12:51
Ok, I've tried your savegame in both System Shock Portable and DOSBOX and it looks like that button simply isn't working how it should be. Unless you actually swapped from the disk version to the CD version on level 9 then I don't see how the switch of versions would have affected it, so I figure it's because the level somehow didn't initialise properly when you entered it.
Do you have a savegame from level 8? You could try getting to level 9 and heading straight to that area from the elevator and see if it works. Failing that, I think the only solution would be to borrow someone else's savegame from level 9.
hreaper on 8/5/2007 at 22:52
Sadly, I only have savegames from level 9...
Well, it doesn't matter. It's near the end of the game and from what I've heard, I don't really miss that much. Thanks for your help anyway.
I'm now trying to get SS2 to run on my machine. The problem is that it won't run on my native windows because of the recent nvidia drivers that I have to use. It also crashes frequently using wine on linux but i can start the game. Well, I'll keep trying. It has to work somehow...
Bjossi on 9/5/2007 at 11:34
Are you sure it is the drivers' fault that it won't run?
hreaper on 9/5/2007 at 13:52
I get a black screen when I try to start a new game. According to several posts in this forum this occurs when you use nvidia graphics drivers newer than 4x.xx or something. There seems to be a workaround by changing the config file but that only worked before driver version 90.00. Since I have a GF8 series graphics board I need to use at least something in the high nineties. Using some Omega version of the driver with an earlier version number is not an option either because nvidia's "unified driver architecture" is not so unified any more. They changed something in the GF8 series that requires special treatment.
If you know of some other reason for this, please tell me. BTW this is a Vista x64 dual-core-system, so I don't really expect it to run ;) ...but it would be nice
Edit:
This is starting to get strange. I just installed the game on my six year old laptop. This is a windows xp system with a GF2 and some old 40ish detonator drivers. It's exactly the same: a black screen. Even with the config file workaround.
