Silent Storm is a more or less okay Jagged Alliance 2 clone. This game has one very annoying bug: On newer systems with >= 4GB of RAM and a recent NVidia Video Card, it will not start up, but instead display the message "Unsupported Video Card" (or "Nicht unterstütze Grafikkarte" in the German version). This is extremely annoying and there are a few workarounds which can be found on the net:

• Downgrade the NVidia Video Driver. This will not work if your Graphics Card is fairly new and the old driver doesn't support it
• Use msconfig.exe to configure the operating system to only recognize 3GB of RAM. Forces you to reboot every time you want to use the RAM for other applications
• Physically remove RAM from your system. I'm not even going to dignify that option with a comment.

So, pretty much, you're screwed, because the original author of the game (JoWooD Entertainment) does not give a flying crap about their game being broken. Here's a solution:

1. Update the game to version 1.02
2. Get a crack for the game to disable the integrity check. I cannot tell you where to get it, but I guess any gamer knows where to get cracks or knows someone who knows...
3. The crack you got should replace the "game.exe" executable of Silent Storm. When you also have the English version (as I do), the uncracked game.exe should have a MD5SUM of 3da8d20d30f99ee441af14730d5158e8 and a size of 8956928 bytes. The cracked version should have a MD5SUM of 78e7523ee377815f0454071993a7a594 and also have a size of 8956928.

Then, open game.exe with a hex editor. Go to offset 0x9bae (or 39854). You should see this:

00009B90   00 FF D3 52  57 FF 15 38  22 8B 00 8B  45 A4 50 E8  ...RW..8"...E.P.
00009BA0   1C C4 3C 00  83 C4 04 E9  01 0D 00 00  3B C7 74 2E  ..<.........;.t.
00009BB0   B9 F7 51 00  00 8D 75 A4  E8 53 FE FF  FF 52 BA 6B  ..Q...u..S...R.k

At position 0x9bae (39854 dec) there's the character 0x74. Change it to 0xEB. Save the file, done. The game should now work! The final executable should have a MD5SUM of 7883a81632fc707e3aa4a72072650a63.

Hammer & Sickle

Silent Storm Hammer & Sickle has the same problem. The patch is very similar: Open SICKLE.EXE, offset 0x1cba (dec 7354) and change 0x74 to 0xeb. Original MD5 of SICKLE.EXE should be bfb4eb2877573c33491e47d557646247, patched MD5 3e294c435f9f27ea639feaf239a74792.

00001CA0   57 FF 15 C0  43 91 00 8B  45 B4 50 E8  90 CB 2D 00  W...C...E.P...-.
00001CB0   83 C4 04 E9  EF FE FF FF  3B C7 74 2E  B9 F7 51 00  ........;.....Q.
00001CC0   00 8D 75 B4  E8 37 FE FF  FF 8B 08 57  68 B4 49 91  ..u..7.....Wh.I.

Download

If the above is too hard for you, here's a patch executable which should do exactly what you want (patches cracked version of Silent Storm 1.02): Download

And for Hammer & Sickle 1.00: Download.