Installation is straightforward, and I recommend choosing the Roland SCC-1 for music and the Sound Blaster 16 for digital audio. After you mount the CD, the game is installed with ORIGIN.BAT (not INSTALL.EXE) on the root directory of the CD. That will save many a headache trying to figure out why the game is not loading.

For any system, I highly recommend that the CD-ROM drive is D. I am assuming you are using the Enhanced CD-ROM version, most people do over the inferior (but original) floppy version. Getting the game running in DOS or DOSBox is no particular chore.

In the spirit of the times, I offer this guide to get the most out of the game. I have beaten the game multiple times and really love it. While it has been unavailable legitimately for many years outside of eBay, GoG is now offering System Shock Enhanced Edition, which includes the original CD-ROM Enhanced version as well as a Windows executable to run the game on modern systems. However, once you get a feel for the game, you should be able to appreciate what it was trying to do. If you are used to DOOM and its simple controls, you are in for quite the learning curve. System Shock is a classic from the DOS gaming era, but trying to play it can be, well, something of a shock.

System shock vs enhanced edition