Game:

System Shock 2 (1999)

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HAPPY 25TH ANNIVERSARY, SYSTEM SHOCK 2!
REAL HARDWARE CAPTURE IN 4:3 ASPECT RATIO.

25 years ago, a brave new team of game makers named Irrational Games co-operated with Looking Glass Studios to put the finishing touches on System Shock 2, which saw retail release in mid-August 1999. It equally entertained and horrified any customer that dared purchase it and install on their computer. Beware of SHODAN!

This version of System Shock 2 is the old 1.15 retail version (straight off the CD-ROM) with no patches of any kind applied. It’s exactly as it was coming out of the gold master. Creative Lab’s EAX 2.0 extensions are used for the reverb effects heard in the footage.

System Shock 2 might not have been a technological marvel or graphically ambitious for its time but the combination of sophisticated level designs with numerous AI/NPC entities roaming the world and extensive use of alpha-textured effects certainly would have strained even the most hard-knuckled home computer money could buy at that time. The gorgeous rendition of a futuristic cyberpunk-infused cruiser ship environment in space houses a myriad of long corridors, large entertainment spaces, furniture-rich dining facilities and complex machinery that will make your processor and 3D accelerator sweat a little to draw on screen, not helped by all the explosions and smoke effects putting further strain on performance. Nothing that a G400 and old Pentium III can't technically handle, of course, but do expect the occasional nasty frame-rate-reducing spike.

The Pentium III 500 would have been a fairly high-end CPU around the time of System Shock 2's release but it wasn't the top-of-the-line part, with the Pentium III 600 already on market and the AMD Athlon only starting to appear on the scene right after System Shock 2 went gold. Still, the 500 handles System Shock 2 well enough. I would have used at least a 550 Mhz part if I could, but my 440BX board doesn't support a 550 Mhz clock. Would need a 440BX-2 for that.

The Matrox G400 was a very new and very high-end 3D card/GPU when System Shock 2 originally came out and it runs quite well on it. I'm using the old Matrox PowerDesk 5.15 drivers from around July 1999 for this game.

This footage and audio was captured from the following computer:
- Compaq Deskpro EP 6400 case and motherboard (manufactured July 1998)
- Intel 440BX motherboard
- Intel Pentium III 500 Mhz processor (S-Spec SL365, manufactured week 10 1999)
- Matrox G400 (DualHead, 32MB) video card (Rev A/105, manufactured around week 25 1999) [Editor’s note: I do have an older Rev A/104 card made around week 22 but sadly it was dead when I bought it.]
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! Value (CT4670) sound card
- 128 MBs of PC100 SDR SDRAM
- Windows 98 (FE) operating system

The capturing was done in VirtualDub2 using a Datapath VisionRGB-E1S PCI-Express capture card plugged into an ASUS Maximus IV Extreme motherboard with an Intel Core i7-2600K using 8 GBs of DDR3 SDRAM and an nVidia GTX 580 video card installed. A VGA cable is connected between the vintage computer and the Datapath capture card to enable video capturing. Audio capture was done by feeding a 3.5mm stereo jack cable into the line in on the ASUS Maximus IV Extreme motherboard from the sound card of the vintage computer. Resizing/upscaling of the raw original 640x480 capture to 2560x1920 was done using VirtualDub2.

Timestamp table:
0:00 — Menu settings
0:11 — Training
1:20 — Loading screen demonstration
1:32 — Training (part 2)
2:25 — Science/Medical
8:45 — Engineering/Cargo Bay
12:04 — Hydroponics
16:45 — Operations
19:18 — Recreational
24:25 — UNN Rickenbacker

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