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- Comments and Errata for the System Shock Playable Demo, v1.0
- ============================================================
- 1. Sound stuff: For space reasons, we have not included our install
- program which would automatically set your System Shock configuration file
- appropriately for your sound card. The demo comes default configured for
- no sound or digital effects. If you want either sound or digital effects,
- you will have to edit your cyb.cfg file yourself. In cyb.cfg, you will
- find, among some other things, the following lines:
-
- digi_card -1
- digi_io -1
- digi_dma -1
- digi_irq -1
- midi_card -1
- midi_io -1
- midi_irq -1
-
- digi_card and midi_card are the big ones; they control what sound or
- effect card the game thinks you have. You can set midi_card or digi_card
- to the appropriate value from the table below:
-
- SoundBlaster 1
- SoundBlasterPro (old) 2
- SoundBlasterPro (new) 3
- SB16 3
- Adlib 4
- General Midi 12
- AWE32 13
-
- midi_irq and midi_io can be set to the appropriate value of your IRQ and
- I/O base address, respectively. Similarly, digi_io, digi_dma, and
- digi_irq can be set to your digital I/O address, DMA, and IRQ. These
- values are in decimal, which may be a bit confusing when setting digi_io
- and midi_io since those values are normally expressed in hex. Note that
- if you leave these values as their original -1, System Shock will attempt
- to use the defaults.
-
- So, if you have a vanilla SB16 (card 3), with all default settings, the
- sound part of your cyb.cfg would look like:
-
- digi_card 3
- digi_io -1
- digi_dma -1
- digi_irq -1
- midi_card 3
- midi_io -1
- midi_irq -1
-
- If you had an SB16 (card 3) on digital IRQ 7, and a Waveblaster
- daughterboard for MIDI (card 12), the sound part of your cyb.cfg would
- look like:
-
- digi_card 3
- digi_io -1
- digi_dma -1
- digi_irq 7
- midi_card 12
- midi_io -1
- midi_irq -1
-
- Gravis Ultrasound users: Although the actual shipping version of System
- Shock that will be available in stores does support the Gravis Ultrasound,
- the playable demo does not. We apologize, but the GUS support had to be
- removed from the playable demo for space reasons.
-
- 2. Memory: System Shock requires 4 Megs of memory, including approximately
- 500k of low memory, in order to play. System Shock will attempt to use
- more memory than that for additional features, such as higher resolution
- texture maps, blended bitmaps, and improved cache performance.
-
- 3. Playing the Game: System Shock comes with some on-line help tools to
- help you learn to play the game as quickly as possible. When you first
- start the game, a screen overlay will appear, labelling the various
- regions of the game screen. This overlay can be brought up again by
- hitting Alt-O. In addition, there is an automatic on-line help system
- that will advise you on how to play the game and manipulate the interface
- during the early stages of the game. It will turn off automatically after
- leaving the initial area. If you want to turn it back on again, use
- Alt-H. There is also a list of keyboard commands, that can be accessed
- via the ? key. These keyboard commands are also in help.txt, in the same
- directory as this file.
-
- 4. Changes from the Real Game: Since this is, well, a demo version of the
- game, we've disabled saving and loading. Needless to say, in the real
- version of the game, you can save and load games. For space
- considerations, a couple of features regarding the "look" of the game were
- removed for the demo. Specifically, there are fewer unique textures in
- the demo than there are in the real level 1, and some anti-aliasing
- techniques that work in the real game are not in the demo. A few
- creatures and sound effects that are present in the full game have also been
- removed for the demo.
-
- 5. Running the Game: To run the demo, just type sshock at the DOS prompt
- after you are done reading this file. Then select "New Game", set your
- difficulty levels, and have fun! Remember that difficulty level 0 in a
- given category means that we have attempted to remove that element as
- much as possible.
-
- 6. We hope you enjoy this demo! If you do, the full game should be available by
- October 1st at a computer software retailer near you.
-
- -- System Shock Developent Team
- LookingGlass Technologies
-