ToxicFrog on 6/12/2007 at 19:28
Something I recently came across while fiddling with Terra Nova...
(
http://solvbe.sourceforge.net/) SolVBE works with System Shock. It won't do resolutions above 640x480 (well, not usefully), but it does both fullscreen and windowed modes, and gives the correct colors in 640x480 and up even on cards (like the Radeon X1950) which tend to go trippy when asked for those modes.
It might be worth including this in future versions as an alternative for cases where dgVESA doesn't work. In my case, dgVESA has a suicide pact with my mouse, but solVBE works fine.
Kolya on 6/12/2007 at 21:11
Thanks for the tip. I didn't quite get that: Does it work above 640x480 or not?
*Looks at the SSP thread*
My biggest problem would probably be, how to communicate, when one should use this 4th mode. There seem to be quite a few people who are challenged with the available options.
ToxicFrog on 7/12/2007 at 07:27
It will let the program running inside it request resolutions higher than 640x480, but solVBE itself always uses a 640x480 surface; if the program uses a higher resolution, solVBE downscales it to 640x480 before blitting it to the screen - so in effect you get a loss in graphical quality and in performance.
There are some games where it might be worth it because a higher resolution would give a wider FOV, but System Shock isn't one of them.
I note that the windowed mode does support x2 and x4 scaling, which means it will do a 1280x960 window. It's unclear, though, whether this means a native 1280x960 resolution, or that the game gets scaled down to 640x480 and then scaled back up to 1280x960 (and SS1 won't do 1280x960 anyways, it's not in the VESA mode table for some reason). We have the source, but implementing support for higher resolutions means windows VDD wizardry, which I'm definitely not conversant with.
Because of this I can't recommend solVBE for general use, but in situations where neither native nor dgVESA work, it's better than playing at 320x240.
Lork on 1/1/2008 at 17:12
Just a few notes on configuring DOSBox - you should probably increase the memsize to to cut down on crashes. Changing the output mode to openglnb gives a massive boost to performance, but draws the screen off center. This can be fixed by going to window mode and back again, though.
Also, is there any way to permanently set the stereo orientation to reversed? It's backwards for me and I always forget to change it until it screws me over.
Enchantermon on 15/5/2008 at 16:03
So.....I have something of an odd problem. I just downloaded the newest version (0.9) of SSP, unpacked it, set it to run in a window, and tried it. It worked just fine. Then I quit, installed VDMSound, and tried it again. Now it won't run in a window, only full screen. If I try windowed mode, I just get a blank window with the prompt blinking in the top-left corner. The only thing I can do is close the window manually. Thinking VDMSound was somehow the culprit, I uninstalled it, but the problem persisted. I deleted SSP and unpacked it again, but no dice.
I would really prefer running this in a window so I can have SSP on one monitor and ShockED on another, as Alt-Tabbing tended to crash SS1 occasionally, and I don't know if the same holds true for SSP (though I'd prefer not to find out at the worst possible moment). Any thoughts? I'm on Windows XP Pro; other information is available upon request.
Oh, and while we're on the subject, where is the Shodan sound test pulling my name from? I was sufficiently creeped out when I first saw that..... :wot:
Kolya on 15/5/2008 at 23:09
I'm not sure how VDMSound could cause the window problem you described. Maybe you forgot to switch to the DOS-tab in DGVoodoo's settings before setting it to windowed mode?
Your windows login name.
Enchantermon on 15/5/2008 at 23:35
I don't think it is; I think there's something else wrong, I was just retelling what was happening.
Erm.....but my login name isn't my full name; it's a nickname. Unless we're talking about two different things. I'm talking about the name of the Administrator account I'm on.
TheNightTerror on 22/7/2008 at 09:21
Forgive me, Kolya, I'm a cold hearted bitch. I come back and all I do is bitch about how the portable version isn't good enough! I just tried to run System Shock portable on my old desktop, as the laptop's away for repairs, and I have two issues.
First off, SS-P doesn't have the nVIDIA Geforce 4 high res fix integrated, or included with it, as far as I can tell. I discovered this the hard way! I reformatted since I last ran SS on this computer so I lost the fix. You may want to include it just in case some other idiot with an ancient video card tries to run it.
Secondly, there's a 1280x1024 resolution out, isn't there? Not that this computer can actually play it smoothly, but it's not included with the portable version either.
I'll return to the pit from whence I came now.
Kolya on 27/7/2008 at 12:22
The "nVIDIA Geforce 4 high res fix" aka "winxpfix" aka "MonitorOutOfRange_Fix" is available in the (
http://www.strangebedfellows.de/index.php/topic,211.0.html) SS-Portable thread over at SBF.
NB: It has recently turned out not to be compatible with the latest winXP service pack 3.
I never planned to integrate it with SS-P as this fix replaces a system file and only a few people actually need it. I think it's good enough to let those download it separately.
(
http://www.strangebedfellows.de/index.php/topic,211.msg4808.html#msg4808) We're working on getting a SP3 compatible version...
ToxicFrog did the (
http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=100041) high res patcher for SS1 and you're right, it supports 1280x1024 resolution. Somehow, somewhere along the way of making SS-P this stopped working and it never bothered me enough to find out why, because the interface layout is drifting apart at 1024x768 already. But yeah, 1280x1024 is on the to-do-list for SS-P 1.0.
PS: Kolya is about to make you his cold hearted bitch!!!!
BlackCapedManX on 23/11/2008 at 07:16
This is a bit of a thread ressurection I'm aware, but I figured it'd be better to post here first rather than start a new thread altogether.
I found SS-Portable while digging through the "How to make SS1 work for XP" sticky, and this is far and above ridiculously easier to impliment than the current front page advice, along with seemingly being somewhat supported (higher than 640x480 res, etc.) For people like me (everyone, I'd assume) who would rather have something simply work, as opposed to reading though 10 pages of a thread before realizing that there's something out there which is far simpler than try to get SS to run through dosbox or natively in windows or whatever, I'd say this or some similar thread about SS-Portable should probably be front paged (I realize the program is 2 years old, but that's part of the problem, when it's buried like that, no one's going to know about it.)
Anyway, just got this up and running and played SS1 for the first time ever and I'm ridiculously happy with it, so I thought that recommending this to the general populace might be more reasonable than fighting with dosbox.
