One day someone will fix it.

Yeah, as I said already, I first played it on a Radeon 9800 SE and the lighting didn't work properly for me there either. IIRC it wasn't as bad as it is on modern cards but I'm positive that the game didn't quite look the way it was supposed to. Years later I got a GeForce 8600 GS and decided to revisit the game. I was sure that now that I had a GeForce the game would finally look the way it was supposed to and AGAIN the shadows were all wrong, actually even worse than on the Radeon 9800 I think.

It's probably worth mentioning that I also had a lot of trouble with the lighting in the original Splinter Cell on most computers over the years but I think there you could easily fix things by changing some stuff in an INI file or something. I think a more adequate example that everyone knows here would be DOSBox since it also allows you to customize the emulated hardware.

The lighting problems in the original is fixable by one quick fix in the ini. Shame Pandora can't be fixed.

The original Splinter Cell has 3 different render paths. The "best" one also only works correctly on GeForce 3, 4 and FX cards. The FX cards display a few shadows incorrectly so my investigations recommend the GeForce4 Ti for Splinter Cell.

The "best" render path can be forced on modern cards but still results in missing lights and shadows because newer graphics cards simply don't support shadow buffers.

More info here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nB9BTbtNyDw&list=PL5T8bmLxd_T22dNjFBZHpq30_nk2HgZ9M

I guess.... but I thought WinUAE to be a more apt example, as at least I recall hardly ever defining exactly what kind of retro-PC I want DOSBox to mimic (make and model of the CPU, how much RAM and which kind exactly, what BIOS etc.), while with WinUAE I've done that quite often depending on the game, even if 90% of Amiga 1000/500 games ran fine on a A500 with 1MB chip RAM, OCS chipset and Kickstart 1.3.

Either DOS games generally didn't care that much of the underlying hardware (some were a bit finicky about the memory configuration, e.g. Privateer and Ultima 7), or DOSBox does great job selecting the best options automatically.

Btw, do you have any idea how the HD collection compares to the original intended look of the games? I just took a quick look at a few PS3 screenshots and the lighting in all three games seems to look better than what I've ever gotten on any PC. Heck, even after the INI fix the first game looks more similar to the PS2 version for me than the PS3 one as far as I can tell.

I guess there was a few standard configurations that the vast majority of DOS games simply was compatible with. But what do I know. Anyway, I see your point.

Thanks for the info, I have boxed version of Splinter Cell Trilogy (it was a trilogy back then when I bought it) but have played only the original (still have to finish it). Hope someone will find a solution for this until I get to playing Pandora Tomorrow.

The HD collection most definitely do not look better. They are missing some random lights and shadows from the PC version. There is also a problem that the first two games run at less than 30fps giving it a very bumpy ride. If you're going to play these games originally either buy them on pc (excluding pandora tomorrow obviously) or by the original xbox versions.

The PS2 ones are fine, the gamecube versions are slight better, XBOX are excellent, PC versions are perfectly fine when they work but the PS3 editions are very poor ports. Anyone coming from gaming on PC will notice the big difference.

Hm, okay. Guess it was just the PR material from before the actual release of the HD collection that made it look so awesome, then.

If you can stomach the slow down it's alright I suppose. It's the kind of thing only someone who has played a PS2 would put up with. But when youve played the gamecube, PC and XBOX version it is hard to go to the PS3 copies. They made it look sharper at the loss of solid performance. Though Chaos Theory plays perfectly fine which is odd.

Yea sorry don't know much about the HD version.

I do have a XBox 360 and got the Xbox version of Splinter Cell and Pandora Tomorrow, however when trying the games out I found out you need a hard drive (I got the 4 GB slim version).

So I don't know how these games look like on the 360. Would be interesting to know.

So I tried a Radeon 9550 and 9800XXL and the game also displays fine!

I quickly tested two ATI cards with that MSI overlay software. 1600 x 1200 at high details.

FX5950 Ultra
Start of level 1: 28 fps
Start of level 2: 18 fps

Medion Radeon 9800XXL
Start of level 1: 31 fps
Start of level 2: 19fps

Radeon 9550
Start of level 1: 11 fps
Start of level 2: 6 fps

The only difference I noticed is that some shadows are softer on the Nvidia card and very sharp and blocky on the ATI card. In terms of performance a card roughly three times as fast as a Radeon 9800 would be required to play at 60 fps at 1600 x 1200 resolution.

Softer shadows on Nvidia FX5950 Ultra:

http://i.imgur.com/QS1uTrp.png

Sharper shadows on ATI Radeon 9550:

http://i.imgur.com/VWb57kE.png

In terms of driver I went with 4.8 based on these findings:

The readme file mentions this: But ships with 4.2 on the DVD.

Looking at the drivers from around 2004 and I was unable to find anything on the AMD site.

Guru 3D has some information and also old drivers.

4.2 has this entry: 4.4 has this entry: 4.6 has this entry: 4.7 has this entry: 4.8 has this entry:

I thought they (Ubisoft) did a rebuild of the game for XBox 360 users. I will never get why they just did not port that game to the PC.

Not as far as I am aware.
You don't have a HDD? man that thing is a necessity for that console.

It's a shame that this doesn't work, Pandora Tomorrow and the original game are pretty damn ace and having all the shadows working at a modern resolution would be amazing. Too bad Ubisoft couldn't fix it or drivers from NVIDIA and possibly AMD couldn't include a way to emulate the shadow buffers with modern cards.