Various and Sundry System Shock Technical Notes

1. Pressing the "Print Screen" key will take a screenshot of your current
game and generate a .GIF file in your shock\gen directory.  These GIFs
will be sequentially numbered.

2. Your saved games are stored in your shock\data directory.  These eight
files are called savgam00.dat, savgam01.dat, ... savgam07.dat.

3. The intro cutscenes require a file called start1.res, found in the
shock\data directory.  You can save disk space by deleting this file after
watching the intro. 

4. The game ships with 128x128 texture maps as well as 64x64.  On a
machine with under 4 1/2Mb free at startup, there will not be room to load
the 128's, and the game will automatically load only the low res maps and
use them.  While this will work fine, you will get grainer, more pixelated
textures.  Thus, if you have an 8Mb machine but are running a 3Mb disk
cache, you will be getting low res textures since there will not be room
for the high-res ones.  Also, with even more available memory, along with
better internal cache performance, creature bitmaps will be blended so
they will look better at close range.

5. Speaking of memory, the game runs under the dos4gw pro 1.97 dos
extender.  At startup it can grab memory from low mem, emm and xms,
depending on the exact memory managers you are running.  If you are
running Qemm, for instance, it can use all free memory.  Under EMM386
only some of the high memory is available to the extender.  In a brighter
future, memory will not be so complicated and frustrating.

6. As you probably know, sound card manufacturers have not yet decided on
certain industry standards.  As much as we wanted to fully support all
possible sound cards, we also wanted to ship this game before the chaos
that will no doubt accompany the turn of the century.  As a result, you
should note the following:

  a) ProAudio Spectrum must be run in SoundBlaster Emulation Mode.  We did
  not get working drivers for the PAS.
 
  b) Many SB16-style cards, such as the Fusion-16, the Gateway2000K, and
  so on, are not compatible with the SB16 mixer detection/DMA transfers we
  use in our digital sound system.  Therefore, if you have one of these
  cards, you will have to do one of the following:
     i) Run in SoundBlaster mode.  This will work fine, although you will
  get 2op voices, fewer midi channels, and a reduction in overall sound
  quality.
    ii) Try running as a SB16.  Something will happen.  The possiblities
  include it just working (yea!), music working but digital effects not
  panning or volume attenuating, or nothing working at all.
  
  c) The Ultrasound requires running a batch file, "shockgus," before
  running the game.  This file primes the GUS dll for the sound system, as
  well as loading the custom patch set we created to try to fit as many
  samples as possible on the 256k cards.  Also, the midi driver 
  occasionally leaves notes playing.  This is a known problem, and
  Gravis has been informed.
  
  d) More on the Gravis: although it will work fine for many players, you
  may have problems running with a Gravis installed on the default IRQ of
  11.  If you have trouble, try installing on an IRQ below 10.  Also, note 
  that the Ultrasound takes its IRQ from your environment variable, and not
  your cyb.cfg.
  
  e) The installer will try to play a test sample for both sound and midi. 
  If you don't hear any sound, but the installer claims that it was
  successful, try setting it up differently.  If the tests don't produce
  sound, the game probably won't either.
  
  f) If you want or need to change sound settings without running install,
  you can edit your IRQ, DMA and I/O port in your cyb.cfg.

7. The install program can be used to make a boot disk.  Most bad
  disks will be detected, but it depends on your DOS setup.  If the boot 
  disk process worked fully, the disk will have the volume label "SHOCK
  BOOT" and contain "COMMAND.COM", "HIMEM.SYS", "AUTOEXEC.BAT", and 
  "CONFIG.SYS".  If these files are not on the disk, the process failed. 
  If this happens, we suggest you try to format the disk yourself from DOS
  with the command "format a: /s" (or b:) and then try a second time.

8. Don't waste your magpulse ammo.
  
                                thanks and enjoy
                                        - The System Shock Team 
                                          Looking Glass
