"I Guess I Really Don't Care if It's Dangerous or Not" - Running Silent Hill 2 on Windows 10

""Forgive me. That's why I did it, honey. I just couldn't watch you suffer."

Ever since I saw San Gillespie speedrun Silent Hill 2 at a GDQ event in 2015, I've had an itch to play it again. This resulted in both good and bad news. The bad news is that I don't still have it on a PlayStation 2 disc. The good news is that Silent Hill 2 was ported to the PC. Twice. The worse news is that neither PC port is on Steam or GOG and probably never will be. The worst news is that the newer version is buggy as hell.

No, really. It's so buggy that if you actually bought the Silent Hill HD Collection you were elligible for a refund for a while, and it's been announced that it won't receive any patches to improve its performance or stability.

It's a bad time to be a Silent Hill fan. Was there ever a good time? You can find copies of the original game for PC on eBay, but those copies are all ridiculously expensive, European PAL-formatted, or both. This is the only way to get ahold of the game.

Sometimes you gotta splurge on the things that are important to you. Treat yo'self.

I've read that if you look carefully enough you can find safe, playable versions of the game online. I hear the hash 006E9436AE87A13E0941B497D1A16AE387E3B5E4 might be useful, but I don't know. Your actual mileage may vary.

But you can't download Silent Hill 2 or just install it from CD-ROM and be on your way because Japanese video game companies from 20 years ago were a little quirky. Legend has it that when Silent Hill 2 was completed, Konami/KCET deleted the source code. The project ended and the game shipped, so the resources were considered to be of no further use. This means that there's no repository of the original game that can be patched to fix bugs or modernize the game to run on newer systems. As I understand it, the HD Collection that was buggy as hell was taken from a rare beta version of Silent Hill 2 that was discovered... somewhere?... and overhauled with new textures and voicework and never polished to the same degree the original Silent Hill 2 final build was.

And this is a problem. The only working version of Silent Hill 2 was written to run on very different systems than what you and I have today. In 1999 if you were playing games, you had a Windows 9x box running on a single-core x86 chip with a nice graphics card and a SoundBlaster audio card and that was that. So that's the architecture that Silent Hill 2 expects and it does not understand our run-of-the-mill Windows NT-based supercomputers with multi-core 64-bit processors and onboard everything, no matter how much compatibility software you put down in front of it.

So even if you spend big bucks on an eBay copy of Silent Hill 2, you won't be able to play the game on a Windows 7/8/8.1/10 machine without a lot of tweaks. Patching the game is no longer feasible for the company that created it. You may want to try installing Windows 95 on the most legacy hardware you have laying around, but I doubt it will run your new old game without incident.

But despair not! There's a way!

Some very intrepid game fans have compiled a method to run Silent Hill 2 on modern hardware. It's a collection of patches and textures and audio and components that, really, is like creating your own HD Collection from base pieces.

The Silent Hill 2 Enhanced Edition Installation Guide is your one-stop shop for all the utilities you need to fetch and apply to a standard install of Silent Hill 2 in order to get it to run on a newer device. I won't summarize herein all of the various bits and bobs that are required since the installation guide does that pretty well. I will, however, point out that I got tired of downloading and installing all of these packages by hand in the right order any time I reinstalled Windows, so I wrote Enhance-SilentHill2.ps1.

Enhance-SilentHill2.ps1 is a PowerShell script that will download and install all the Enhanced Edition packages you need to get Silent Hill 2 running on a Windows 10 host. It will also download the Microsoft Visual C++ runtime and DirectX packages you need to install and attempt to elevate itself using UAC to install them.

I wrote this script for an earlier version of the Enhanced Edition, back when there were special steps if your video card was made by NVIDIA. The team is actively working on updates and recently released an updated set of instructions, so I took some time to revise Enhance-SilentHill2.ps1 and make it compliant with the latest Enhanced Edition packages as of late January 2019. The script will invariably fall behind when updates occur, but I hope that the script is simple enough for users to understand where and how to modify it as version numbers change. I'll do the best I can between now and the time that the project becomes stale and uninteresting.