Game:

The Terminator: Future Shock (1995)

Duration: 0:00

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REAL HARDWARE CAPTURE IN 8:5/16:10 ASPECT RATIO.
General MIDI soundtrack provided by Roland SC-88.

Fuelled by Danish programming superpowers, Terminator: Future Shock (Bethesda Softworks, 1995) is a competently made movie-licensed PC game with some pretty slick ideas and tech for its age. Aside from the last couple of missions, Future Shock is a game that doesn’t bust your balls too much and lets you play it somewhat carelessly like a gun-toting run-and-gun redneck. It’s fun, it’s atmospheric and has an entertaining plot worth following. The sewer levels aren’t as bad as some dumb morons on YT make them out to be, so shut up.

This video contains footage from the unpatched version (1.00, compiled December 4th 1995) of the game and, to my surprise, wasn’t as buggy or crash-happy as I was fearing it might be. There was one time when I ran away from a bunch of H/K aircrafts and blew them all up right above a bunch of robots, showering them with debris from the H/K’s, resulting in so many simultaneously exploding enemies that the game crashed harder than a jet airliner flying into a building.

How does it run then?
About as well as you might expect from a game with egregious use of texture mapping and dynamic lighting from ‘95; mostly OK but with the occasional nastier slowdown depending on scene complexity. It’s kind of surprising that Future Shock only runs marginally worse than Daggerfall considering its liberal use of textured 3D-modelled enemies that get a kick out of shooting lasers/plasma at you. What WILL get your machine sweating, however, are instances of either lots of enemies visible at once, lots of dynamic lights visible at once or a combination of both. The draw distance limit ensures that the outdoor environments won’t stress out your processor/CPU too much but, surprisingly, interior areas can often become a source of performance loss when a lot of light sources exist in a room. Rare instances of the game allowing you to disable all lights in an enemy base/prison/facility offers a glimpse at how big that performance cost truly is!

How does this compare to Quake? Future Shock does not make use of light-mapped dynamic lighting but it still makes good use of vertex-based dynamic lights frequently, whether it’s from projectile impacts or explosions or nearby light sources. It looks pretty nice in motion but there are clearly visible gradient bands on light spots, possibly for polygon fill time reasons. Combine this the usually more-complex-than-box-shaped-rooms level geometry and I think Future Shock is at least somewhat morally justified running the way it does, draw distance limit included. That and the possibility that it uses zero float instruction parallelism in its code but I can’t comment on that. I mean, it had to run on a 486 somehow, right?

I didn’t try out the lower detail settings, which seems to be a common behavioral pattern with me.

Mach 64 drivers: Windows 95 RTM (OEM) CD-ROM default.
AWE32 drivers: Windows 95 RTM (OEM) CD-ROM default.

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, heatspreader is marked week 12 1994)
256 KBs of asynchronous L2 cache
ATi Graphics Pro Turbo (Mach64 GX) 4 MB graphics card (P/N 109-25500-10, early revision with silk-screened blank FCC ID box, sticker with “FCC ID: EXM255” on card, manufactured around April 1994)
Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE32 sound card (CT2760, board manufactured week 8 1994, serial number is 2765)
48 MBs of FPM DRAM; 8MBx2 (Q1 1993) and 16MBx2 (week 10 1997) SIMM, 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. A VGA-to-DVI 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 3200x2400 was done using VirtualDub2.

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - Main menu/Starting mission
4:31 - Fighting through ravine
7:50 - Piloting an H/K
11:17 - Dynamic lighting ON vs. OFF
13:14 - Indoor action!
15:55 - Driving a car

#terminator #futureshock #terminatorfutureshock #msdos #pentium #awe32 #ati #mach64 #vga #vesa #softwarerendering #xngine #bethesdasoftworks #sc88 #soundcanvas #roland #generalmidi #periodcorrect #430nx #datapath #upscaling #visionrgb #e1s powered by xngine by kaare siesing and julian lefay