Edit: I've now put together an easy to use Wine wrapper for this game.

As noted by others in the release thread, I've found that System Shock Enhanced Edition appears to run perfectly in Wine except that there's no music. I've got the music working on my system (running Linux Mint) by doing the following:

First, install the packages "fluidsynth" and "fluid-soundfont-gm" (you can ignore the second one if you want to use an alternative soundfont). Then, before you start the game, start fluidsynth with this command:

fluidsynth --audio-driver=alsa /usr/share/sounds/sf2/FluidR3_GM.sf2

(if you're using a different soundfont then substitute /usr/share/sounds/sf2/FluidR3_GM.sf2 with the soundfont you want to use).

Leave it to run in the background as you play SSE and exit when you're done playing.

That's a good one: Confirm running also on elementaryOS Luna (based on Ubuntu 12.04). Thanks for this tipp! :-)

I have the music working allright with emu10k1 wavetable, but I'm not having sound effects nor speech for some reason.
Do you have those?

Sound effects & speech all work fine for me

Okay, I can probably blame my uncommon sound setup or one of my many tweaks and customizations, then.

I seem to be suffering from wine bug #28880 or something related. sshock.exe uses SDL2.dll that inherits SDL_AUDIODRIVER="alsa" from my Linux environment and tries to make use of it, but it fails because there is no alsa in windows. Curiously unsetting this variable doesn't help and sshock.exe hangs when exiting then. If I set it to "winmm", I do get sound but it's very choppy and broken, and I lose the music.

At least the classic works fine in DOSBox, if I can't come up with a good solution. Do you use upstream wine, wine-staging, playonlinux or what?

I normally use CrossOver, but I've just tested with three different versions of Wine-Staging (1.7.51, 1.7.50 and 1.7.49) via PlayOnLinux and sound fails to work in 1.7.51 & 1.7.50 but works properly in 1.7.49

Using Wine 1.6 with PlayOnLinux works also perfect!

Thanks for the hint. Try SDL_AUDIODRIVER="directsound" instead of "winmm". Works fine for me.

You are right, that seems to work well. Nice, thanks.

I don't get the game to work at all. I only get a black screen. Using Wine 1.7.5.

You'd probably be better off just running the DOS version and adding the Mouselook patch yourself. The performance would probably be better and you wouldn't really be missing anything.

there is just no way dosbox would beat EE (SHLINK) in performance.

Might be worth trying different Wine versions, and/or perhaps updating/changing your graphics drivers?

I've tested & got the game working in both CrossOver 14.1.6 (which is based on Wine 1.7.25) and PlayOnLinux (using Wine Staging 1.7.49, and Wine 1.6.2 from the system repositories). No special settings or tweaks were required - it's pretty much a case of install & run, aside from running fluidsynth beforehand for the midi playback to work.


Well its performance in CrossOver has been excellent so far for me. According to the game's store page it uses OpenGL so (in my experience) it's likely that its performance is at least as good as on Windows, if not better.

Ehhhhh..... Not really.

The EE works via using bindings from the original game (in DOS) to its Win32 equivalent. So, in other words, it's translating the normal functions of SS1 from DOS to Windows. Add Crossover into the mix and what you have is : EE : Converts Dos to Win32 (GDI/OpenGL) -> Crossover : Converts Win32 to OSx (Cocoa). So, basically, you're forcing it to do an additional translation step. This part is irrefutable.

If the performance is good for you, then great, but I'm just telling you you're making your system work harder than it needs to with really no tangible gain. The only thing the EE does (slightly) better than the CE with Mouselook is deal with 1024x768, which you can also get in Dosbox via the Mouselook patch, though it doesn't deal with it quite as well (There's no mouse scaling when the cursor is loose, so the cursor takes longer to move across the screen). But the difference in SS1 from 800x600 (Runs and looks great, no issues) to the EE in 1024x768 is really negligible at best. Try it and see for yourself.

Well performance-wise SSEE runs about the same on Linux via CrossOver as it does on Windows 7 on my system at least (actually *slightly* higher in CrossOver, only by 5-10fps max), both averaging around 80-90fps.

Edit: I've now had a quick play about with the classic version in DOSBox with the mouselook mod to compare. It was more of a hassle to set up and didn't perform as well as the EE does in Wine/CrossOver.