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Updated
on July 12, 2001 by Thomas
McGuire
 Serious Sam is a semi-new First Person
shooter developed by Croteam.
Featuring a powerful 3D Engine & frantic gameplay with literally
dozens of enemy on screen at any given time & vast environments
it’s hard to believe the game can run as good as it does. Of course,
for many it doesn’t. This guide will take you through the mass of
options available for the game.
Troubleshooting
You should first download any patches
available for Serious Sam. You can find download links over at the Official
website. Be sure you have the patch installed before doing anything
to the Games settings as installing any patch for the game will reset
settings to default values.
Next download the latest drivers for your
Graphics card & Soundcard. This can solve (some) display or audio
problems you might encounter. There are links to various manufacturers
on the Drivers page.
Install DirectX
8.0A, or later, on your system if you haven’t already. This can
fix problems with Sound & Input devices. It may also improve
performance, although this may vary depending on how well your drivers
are optimized for DirectX 8.
If you experience static noise or
irregular audio playback, try the following (assuming that installing
the latest drivers don’t fix the problems):
1.
Click on Start, Settings, then Control Panel.
If you have Windows 2000 or Millennium Edition installed note the icon
names as shown in brackets below.
2.
Open the Multimedia (Sounds & Multimedia) icon.
3.
Select the Audio tab & then hit the Advanced
Properties (Advanced) button.
4.
Select the Performance tab.
5.
Move the Hardware acceleration slider to the 2nd notch
from the left (Basic Acceleration). Move the Sample rate
conversion quality slider to the middle notch (Improved sample rate
converter).
If you are having problems running the
game (Performance or otherwise) on Windows 2000 then try checking our
Windows 2000 Compatibility
& Performance guide.
If you experience any lockups & such
they might be caused by overclocking, if so try lowering the
Memory/Core speed of the overclocked device.
Installation
Although
this is rather obvious you’d be surprised how many people overlook the
simple things. When (re)installing Serious Sam be sure to do a Typical
or Full installation of Serious Sam, this will install all game
files to your hard drive.
The
hard drive is significantly faster than the CD/DVD is for
accessing/loading data & as a result level loading times &
overall performance will be greatly improved with such
installations. With smaller installation types data will need to be read
from the CD during the game, which is a sub-optimal approach to say the
least. Given the average sizes of Hard drives in use today Serious Sam's
installation size shouldn't be of much concern (Most games are 200MB
larger).
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