Silent Hill 2 PC modders have just fixed a 20-year-old, game crashing bug
The glitch has gotten worse over the years as hardware has improved.
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The modding team behind Silent Hill 2 Enhanced Edition have finally managed to fix a game crashing bug that's been around for 20 years.
Konami has quite famously never given Silent Hill the treatment it might deserve when it comes to ports of the game. There's those infamous 'HD editions' on more modern consoles, but even on PC games like Silent Hill 2 suffered from a number of issues. One particular glitch would frequently cause the game to crash, but thanks to a team of modders, it's a thing of the past.
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Silent Hill 2: Enhanced Edition is an ongoing project that seeks to make the game run better on modern hardware, including bringing in widescreen aspect ratios and improving visuals and audio. Which sounds a lot better than remaking the game if you ask us.
However, there's one particular glitch that's been a big problem for playing the game on PC, made increasingly worse due to modern processors.
Specifically, the game's streaming audio engine doesn't like multi-core CPUs, which basically every computer uses now. The glitch would start of by certain bits of audio skipping, followed by the game crashing.
The rough work around up until now has been to disable every processor core except for one to play it, but that's not exactly the easiest or best way to go about things.
So to provide a proper fix, the Enhanced Edition team completely rebuilt the streaming audio engine from the ground up so that it doesn't cause any trouble on multi-core CPUs.
The most recent update, as detailed in the eighth video update, also brought in a range of other improvements, like improving the quality of the FMV cutscenes, a hard thing to do as they will all be pre-rendered.
Unfortunately, playing the game on PC at all is a bit of a tough task. The game isn't available on any digital storefronts, meaning you'll need a boxed copy, and it isn't the cheapest thing in the world.
