Silent Hunter I

[Nefaro]

Dug out my old copy of the original Silent Hunter, having the urge for some Pacific sub patrols.

Struggled to figure out why the damn in-game sound wasn't working in DOSbox.  Even though I recall having it work fine back around '07 or so, after some wrangling.

Evidently my fancy Silent Hunter CD-ROM, complete with Win95 installer, was still version 1.0, even though it was a copy from a year after the game's release.   :-\   The sounds only work after some old-school patching via DOSbox and some light INI text modification.   Hadn't realized I needed patches for this antique.

Posted the details on how to do it, for those with this version of the Silent Hunter v1.0 CD-ROM over at Subsim, in case some of you feel the urge to revisit this oldie:  Subsim SH1 thread link   Some already have v1.3 with the "Commander's Edition" it seems.


Now to taste the fruits of fictory!

[gameleaper]

interesting sub forum. I don't have SH1, but was good looking at someone elses sync problems :)

[Toonces]

Sweet baby peas, Nefaro.  SH3 and 4 are like $5 on Steam.  Upgrade man!

[Staggerwing]

SH1's graphics are actually pretty good for it's time.

[Tuna]

Sweet baby peas, Nefaro.  SH3 and 4 are like $5 on Steam.  Upgrade man!

Nef already owns them, he's our Site Mod Expert on the SH series!  O0

[Nefaro]

Sweet baby peas, Nefaro.  SH3 and 4 are like $5 on Steam.  Upgrade man!

I have all the Silent Hunter series.

But there is something romantic about the first one.  Aside from being one of the best-looking (and last) DOS games ever created, it still has that perfect mix of campaign and sim parts.  Gives me the same kind of nostalgia I had playing the old Silent Service as a kid, but without burning my retinas through with the hyper-pixelated graphics looking like indistinct blobs.

When I play SH 3, 4, and 5, I always do manual torpedo solution.  Spend all huge amounts of transit time on the map screen, with time compression jammed to "OMFGEXPLODING", and generally spending extra time wandering around.   I've played the newer ones quite a bit.

Also.. bugs.  Bugs everywhere.  SH3 & SH5 especially.  I stopped playing SH3 years ago due to a couple recurring bugs which finally made me rage quit.  Even when you modded up the game, they were still there and I always seemed to trigger them on every patrol.  The "unending superstorm" patrol problem, for example, wasn't fixed until one of the later patches... in SH4.    

That brings us to SH3-5 requiring some serious Mod Soup.  Not only to fix some bugs (never all) but to make the game more realistic and/or challenging.  SH4 is obviously the most complete & well-done of the series (unless you're one of the Axis Fanboys who absolutely refuse to play anything but a U-boat  ::)  ) but even that one still needs lots of minor modification to improve it's gameplay and make the enemy DDs more challenging in general. 

SH5, aside from it's problematic Ubisoft login bullshit, was left with some serious bugs that require obscure little mods to fix.  It looks beautiful but was never finished.  I blame that completely on Ubi's buggy and extremely annoying DRM system it was released with.  I wasn't the only one who refused to purchase it until they removed the Always Online requirement, and even then that crap still annoys me.  Fans of the series voted by not purchasing due to that, and support was quickly dropped.  I think most of us have been hoping that someone other than Ubi would pick up where Ubi deliberately failed.

Fortunately the Trigger Maru mod for SH4 combined most of the essential smaller ones for SH4 into one mega-mod.  But I still have to go in and make my own changes on a few things, to my own taste.  I regularly become burned out on the later SH series, just from having to mod & test the damn things so much, before even starting to play in earnest.    

It's nice to just load up an old-school style sub sim, with old school campaign, and jam.  It's challenging & works properly right out of the box.. no work required to fix it up manually.  :)  I don't feel the need to do manual solutions since the proper in-game tools aren't available.

[Toonces]

Interesting perspective.  I'm actually pretty n00b at Silent Hunter-type sims so this is one case where ignorance really is bliss.  I find SH3 and 4 fine right out of the box.   :P

It's funny you post this thread now, though.  I've been thinking of rebooting SH4 and giving it a go again.  I really didn't spend enough time with it.

[Nefaro]

It's funny you post this thread now, though.  I've been thinking of rebooting SH4 and giving it a go again.  I really didn't spend enough time with it.

I'll load SH4 again sometime, at this rate.  When I get an urge to play a specific genre, it sticks for a bit.

Just wasn't ready to spend a lot of time with the Mod Soup yet.  Even though I recall saving my own modified version of the TM mod on an external drive.  Hopefully it was the final version or I'll have to go through and tweak the stuff again, for the 12th time.

Plus after picking up ye olde Silent Service 2 on the Steam sale, for some Nostalgia Lite, it just made me want to play what was essentially the penultimate of it's type.   The original SH.  8)

[Philippe]

SH 1 was a wonderful game and a breath of fresh air compared to the other subsims that were out there at the time.

I still remember the time that I was at periscope depth and raised and look out of my periscope at the exact instant a plane dropped a bomb on me.  I actually saw the bomb in the split second before it hit.  I was laughing so hard I didn't mind losing.

My own personal bugbear has always been that I want to be able to control each engine and set of screws separately. 

I don't want turning to be severly degraded when the rudder is knocked out.  I want it to be impossible, and I want to have to turn by running the two engines in opposite directions.

[Toonces]

Well, this isn't about Silent Hunter 1, but it is about SH3/4 and I didn't want to start a new thread.

So I'm firing up SH3 for the first time in forever.  With both 3 and 4 at about the 2 hour mark of game time I run into the same problem:  transiting out from base to the patrol area is a damn pain in the ass and not fun at all.  For example, in my current just started campaign, I'm playing 1942 out of Bergen, Norway and I'm transiting to a spot in the mid-North Atlantic.  I was hoping to slip around Scapa Flow, through the GIUK gap and into the Atlantic, but there are patrol planes just clobbering me.  So I guess I'm going to have to go around Iceland and into the Denmark Strait.  The thing is, I guess it's summer and the sun isn't fully setting so I can't transit on the surface at night.  And I don't have a snorkel so I can't transit submerged.

I'm in this vicious loop where I can only surface and make way for a few minutes at a time before I have to crash dive, wait an hour time-compressed, surface and repeat.  It's infuriating.  I want to get on with a patrol, but I'm spending all of my time dodging ASW air patrols just getting to the good stuff.  This happens in SH4 too, and it's why I always quit at about 2 hours into the game.

Am I missing something?  Is there some way around this, am I just not playing right, or is this all part of the realism and fun?  'Cause bruddah, it ain't fun.

[Toonces]

Also, is there anywhere to get Silent Hunter 1 Commander's Edition?  I see a few abandonware sites with SH1, but I was looking to get a legit copy if possible.

[Jarhead0331]

Are you playing SH3/4 with mods?

[Pete Dero]

Also, is there anywhere to get Silent Hunter 1 Commander's Edition?  I see a few abandonware sites with SH1, but I was looking to get a legit copy if possible.

You can find some on Amazon but a new one is selling for $89 or more.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B0002SKC4O/ref=dp_olp_afts?ie=UTF8&condition=all&qid=1587656865&sr=8-7
https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B00005YX8H/ref=dp_olp_afts?ie=UTF8&condition=all&qid=1587656887&sr=8-8
https://www.amazon.com/Silent-Hunter-PC/dp/B00005M077
https://www.amazon.de/Silent-Hunter-Commanders-Edition-Superpreiswert/dp/3896271385

[Toonces]

Both are currently unmodded.

[Jarhead0331]

Both are currently unmodded.

Have you tried editing the Airstrike.cfg file? I think you can alter the chance of airstrikes with this.