Yes, HL 1 was a great game and if you havent played it, you should.

HL1 was written a long time ago and it had only had so much memory and CPU to present the game to you -- yet it did a lot.

When playing, use the source version of HL1 -- it is probably is more compatible with today's systems.

You should probably max out graphics and sound options. Turn on V-sync or use fps_max to prevent very high framerates that might cause simulation problems.

Forcing anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering ... and turning off filter opimizations via drivers if needed will help improve visuals. If the game doesnt support (LCD) widescreen then then you might want to turn off scaling or non aspect ratio preserving scaling. NVidia allows this in drivers or you monitor might have a setting.

If you play at high resolutions, then the texture filtering will be less pronounced even though the textures are still low in resolution. This makes the textures look sharper but makes their low resolution more apparent.

If you use the console, you can disable compression of textures to get a little more out of them.

I have noticed that playing old games on new systems at high difficulty is harder than it was on older systems. Playing on harddifficulty will make a few parts of the game unnecessarily difficult. Some enemies can decide to rush you and at higher difficulty they wont go down quick enough.

I recently played system shock 2 on a 7900GTX winXP system.

Its a great game for the story and you dont have to play with the difficulty up.

use ss2tool:

http://www.strangebedfellows.de/index.php?PHPSESSID=130e8bd469a10f6a51e74926105612b4&/topic,106.0.html

I didnt use mod manager because some people said it can cause problems and the mods I was using were non-conflicting.

then I used some mods

http://www.strangebedfellows.de/index.php?PHPSESSID=130e8bd469a10f6a51e74926105612b4&board=2.0

SS2 SHTUP (Shock Texture Update Project)

SS2 Rebirth Beta 01 - Complemented Version « 1 2 »

and maybe something else texture related.

I wanted to play the original gameplay so I didnt install anything more.

The game is old and has limited polygons and 16bit textures -- any modern graphics card can produce screens in no time.

Use the highest resolution the game will allow, go to your graphics card settings-- turn on antialiasing, ansio to make it look better. (add the shock2.exe as a game profile)

Editing Cam.cfg or other config files might allow other resolutions, but the game might still be expecting a 4:3 aspect ratio.

Forcing vsync in the game profile will prevent the game from trying to produce a very high number for frames per second that might cause some gameplay strangeness.

On a crt it looks great once you get use to the lower poly and textures for the first couple of minutes.

I noticed that an LCD will often stretch the highest game resolution to match your monitor. An LCD monitor also produced strange artifacts stretching the 16bit textures. A widescreen monitor could also stretch it more horizontally than vertically. Nvidia driver control panels allow you to prevent scaling even if you monitor doesnt have a setting. It also allows you to use nvidia scaling instead of your monitor scaling, and it allows scaling but with the same aspect ratio. If you dont liketheimagebeing small without scaling try the nvidia scaling or try using a VGA cable -- the monitor scaler might not produce artifacts on vga (I didnt try it on SS2 but Tomb Raider 1 on another computer with VGA cable)

The SS2 Toolssays it sets cpu affinity to one cpu on a multiprocessor for you.

Load screens are in a lower resolution -- there might be a hack for this.

Patch notes: readmep.wri contains tweaks to slow respawns and breakage.

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Gameplay Advice - read on it you want

System Shock 2 has some good tension to it but you don't have to let it bug you.

Save often the first time through - The game does not save for you.

Your upgrades are important - SAVE before. Concentrate on what will make you more effective given the resources you have. Even when you know what will show up in the future, you kinda have pressing needs like staying alive. Many recent games let you choose any upgrades you want and still do ok - maybe on easy? Read the manual --some upgrades have some benefits/side-benefits that you really could use. SS2 want you to do some thinking here -- some "hard" choices.

Look for what is effective against what creatures.

The animations can be a little coarse and the gunplay has a bit of a delay/rhythm to it -- add some distance, dodge and use some cover and you can do ok.

SS2 has enemy respawn - try not to go to very low heath - its seems easier to stay high. Threre are a few (couple) places where the respawn is high and one place fairly near the beginning that you really cant say in - you have to push through and deal with some on other side, complete your objectives and then quickly pass back through. Later after you are done with an area, it seems to calm down a bit, but it takes a while.

Resources are important and can be low in quantity - aweapon that you could always find ammo for would be useful.

There is a config file setting to slow weapon breaking - breaking can be a major pain sometimes -- as it can happen quite often.