Game:

System Shock (1994)

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REAL HARDWARE CAPTURE IN 8:5/16:10 ASPECT RATIO (640x400). Commentary subtitles are available!
Happy 30th Birthday, System Shock!

This is a fixed re-upload of a mostly identical video. The old one can be seen here for reference:    • (OBSOLETE) System Shock: How it runs ...  

Setting the scene: It's 1994 and the software rendering era is STILL in full swing on IBM PC-compatible computers. The Pentium 90 MHz and 100 MHz are the fastest x86 performers around. System Shock just came out in late September that year. Will it run without hitches on a fast Pentium processor? I hope you're ready to be disappointed LOL

Make no mistake, System Shock runs absolutely fine on a Pentium 90 Mhz CPU and ATi Mach 64 GX graphics adapter. "Fine" in this case is relative and when discussing software-rendered texture-mapped and dynamically lit 3D action games you really have to take what you can get on hardware of this time. Yes, the game does struggle to render a smooth sequence of frames when fullscreen mode is enabled and even more so depending on the environment’s complexity. Keep in mind that the old floppy version is stuck with a 320x200 pixel resolution, which means that the enhanced CD-ROM edition’s 640x400 (and higher) pixel count is even trickier to handle for the poor Pentium.

Is this the “Crysis of 1994”? In some ways, yeah, I think so. In other ways, I think Magic Carpet takes that title, but it really depends on which aspects you compare. MC has the destructible environments, polygonal reflective water, anti-aliasing, motion blur, nice technical features like that. However, System Shock’s draw distance is great, lighting is excellent, lots of destructible objects and some gameplay mechanics predict Crysis too (multiple ammo and explosive types, shield and speed enhancements, leaning and tactical shooting)! It’s a strong candidate for sure!

I’ll make a confession; the plan was originally to have the game running under MS-DOS 6.22 but I didn’t manage to get it working on time so I opted to run System Shock in Windows 95 (first edition, OEM) instead, which means that it effectively runs in MS-DOS 7. To avoid any potential issues, I use a FAT16 partition on the hard drive instead of FAT32. FAT32 gives me crashes and generally worse compatibility with pre-Windows 95 DOS games, such as the spell menu crashing in Magic Carpet (1994).

This footage and audio was captured from the following computer:
Gateway 2000 P5-90 case and motherboard (manufactured April 27th 1994)
Intel 430NX chipset
Intel Pentium 90 Mhz processor (S-Spec SX879, manufactured around April 1994)
256 KBs of asynchronous L2 cache
ATi Graphics Pro Turbo (Mach 64 GX) 2 MB graphics card (P/N 109-25500-10, early revision card with silk-screened blank FCC ID white rectangle and EXM255 on sticker, manufactured around late April/early May 1994)
Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE32 sound card (CT2760, manufactured around late first quarter of 1994)
48 MBs of FPM RAM (8MBx2 and 16MBx2 sticks, 60ns)

The capturing was done with VCS (which can be found on the Internet Archive) and OBS Studio 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 (basically, using my 2011 “vintage” PC). A VGA cable is connected between the source 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 640x400 capture to 3200x2000 was done using VirtualDub2.

Timestamp table:
0:00 — Main menu/Level 1: Medical
2:59 — Level 2: Research
6:14 — Level 3: Maintenance
9:12 — Level R: Reactor
11:59 — Level 4: Storage
15:14 — Level 6: Executive
19:55 — Cyberspace
22:27 — Intro (floppy version)

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