I was playing all these games like a week ago, I haven't tinkered with them at all, but for some reason, the cinematics are not working.

Briefings before missions for the Thief games, the ending to System Shock 2. All of them suddenly are not working. Again, they were working fine not too long ago.

Try using Voodoo 2 with it. Just dump everything in the "MS\x86" folder into the install folder. You also might want to configure it to get rid of the watermark and set resolution.

I've installed Voodoo 2 with Thief recently and it seems to work well. I haven't really started playing the game yet, just played a few minuted to make sure everything was OK.

Voodoo 2 worked well with a lot of older windows games.

I've read that merely rebooting my PC would fix it because of some corruption of codecs.

Restarting the PC would default the codecs I think.

Even if rebooting does fix the issue, I strongly suggest you try Voodoo 2. I currently have it installed for Just Cause and Thief, and a bunch of other games in the past. Voodoo 2 lets you run the game at higher resolution, make the game look better and helps with stability.

Edit: seems someone likes nGlide over Voodoo. Never tried it but think I'll give it a try.

I started SS2 recently(several days ago) and they worked just fine, and I could check but i'm guessing mine still do.

Did you corrupt your files somehow? Maybe the codecs got corrupted? Maybe your OS is borked and needs a reset?

It's possible that Windows has borked the video codec. Try reinstalling one of the games. Also in the cam_ext.cfg files in each folder, under the "movie playback" section, make sure no_unload_ffmpeg is there and uncommented (no ; before it).

This...also the fan sites listed in the SS subforums (like systemshock.org iirc) have some fixes as well on them, and other things of interest.

I had the issue with Indeo / Vimeo codecs in some old game once on a new computer. It was resolved by applying latest K-Lite codecs pack (a good addition to Media Player Classic). Try it, install the codecs pack (normal pack should do), restart your PC and let us know. And how exactly an alternative wrapper for the game engine might help with cutscenes not playing?

Guys, all I did was reboot my PC and its working again. And to me this is an easy enough fix.

A bit TOO easy, perhaps....we need to go further and do more....much, much more.

*gets out tool box*

:D

(Again, good to hear you got it sorted out....now have fun playing. :))

So, is that indicative that you don’t turn your computer off normally? If so, bad idea. Switch it off each time your not using it, let’s windows cleanup, install outstanding items and startup/reboot services.

Will do everytime I go to sleep.

I am just gonna have to stomach the slowness of all my programs.

Like when you turn on a PC, launching games like World of Warcraft or Total War: Warhammer for the first time loads and starts very slow.

Or launching Google Chrome or Steam takes awhile.

I've had it fix a number of problems. If I recall it's helped with

Samantha Swift and the Hidden Roses of Athena started OK the first few times but started to freeze on startup (white screen). Worked after installing the wrapper.

One of the Atlantis games was laggy until I used the wrapper. umm, pretty sure it was one of the Atlantis games.

That's the most recent games (with problems) I can think of. I'm not saying the wrapper will fix every game. I've had it make games unplayable. Using it on Dungeon Seige 2 made the body of the characters disappear. Just tested it on Return to Mysterious Island, doesn't work. Introduced a graphical bug.

For the past month or so, I've been using the wrapper on all the old games I start playing, with good results.

Nice wrapper for old DirectX games (5-7), especially written for Glide API. It could fix a really old game engine to run on moder PC but how exactly it is related to cutscenes playback and codecs?

No idea, I'm not that tech-savvy. I do know that the wrapper works with Thief and thought the wrapper might help.