Enabling cinematics (TFTD)
When the Dos version of Terror From the Deep was first introduced on CD-ROM, it offered two options to install the game. A partial or full install. The partial installed only installed the necessary files and ran its files off the CD-ROM, while the full hard disk install installed all the game files. Unique to the partial install were the animated intro and the two (bad end) outros, while the full hard disk installation only got screencap slides of the animated intro.
With today's hard drive space restrictions being much more lenient that the animation files are but a speck of dust compared to what they were in the dark ages of home computers. Creating a true 'full' installation is quite a simple process.
Enabling the animations
NOTE: these instructions currently only relate to the DOS editions of TFTD.
There two things you need to do to get the animations working.
- Copy the ANIMS\ folder from the CD-ROM into the game directory
- A file called cdspeed.dat must be created and placed in the SOUND\ directory.
The second step is very important, otherwise it will continue to play the intro slides.
Misc
Though not necessary, you can also rename the ANIMS_INT folder to ANIMS_IN to hide it from the game. That is where all the slideshow images are stored.
You also get the animations to play if you run the game's setup and set no sound to both SFX and Midi output. In this case, the cdspeed.dat file is not necessary. This method is not desirable unless you want to run a silent game.
SOUND\CDSPEED.DAT
CDSPEED.DAT is 2 bytes in length and stores a value that represents the speed of your CD-ROM drive.
Under normal circumstances, this file is created by CDSPEED.EXE. CDSPEED.EXE is a program used by the partial install to gauges the speed of your CD-ROM Drive, and it stores this as a 16-bit value in CDSPEED.DAT.
The contents of this file however aren't really important for getting the hard disk installation working with the animations.