1) The historical data in the initial Halls of Fame reflects postwar JANAC tonnage scores analysis with one exception: the War Career lists, which represent wartime claims. We used these because they seemed more in the spirit of the game. The top ten tonnage scores for war careers per JANAC are: Fluckey(95,360), O'Kane(93,824), Underwood(75,386), Cutter(72,000), Munson(67,630), Gross(65,735), Whitaker(60,846), Reich (59,839), Triebel(58,837), Andrews(57,243), Morton(55,000).
2) Fans of strict historical accuracy have noted that contacts are more frequent in Silent Service II than in real life. In reality many subs never found a target throughout an entire war patrol. To play the simulation as a "purist", use a deck of cards. For each contact you make where there's an option to avoid battle (you have a Y/N choice), draw a card. If the card is 2 through 10, or an Ace, you MUST say no (N). If you get royalty (K,Q or J) you can make the choice normally. Reshuffle after every patrol.
3) NEW KEY: The "s" key toggles on and off a special "extra-slow" speed. This may be useful on 386/33+ or 486 machines. The slow-down affects ALL time acceleration modes, not just the slowest.
4) NEW KEY: The "l" (lower-case L) key spins the periscope 180 degrees.
5) You can restore the original historical data to your various Hall of Fame screens by copying the HALL.??? files from Disk C.
6) Make sure CapsLock is OFF when you play. We also suggest having NumLock off unless your keyboard requires it to be on for functional cursor keys.
7) Ignore the "not enough memory" warning at your peril. The alt F1 key will report currently available RAM. If you have 0 or a small number (like 3!) you're cruising for a crash. See the Technical Supplement for details. SSII isn't the only game that needs lots of memory, especially in DOS 4. I (Arnold Hendrick) have a BAT file that lets me select one of six different configurations (Config.Sys and Autoexec.Bat) for my DOS 4.01 386/20, depending on the memory and type of drivers a game requires.
8) Your current save game and Hall of Fame files can not be used with the 457.03 version of SSII. There have been changes to these files and the way that they are saved. This was to repair several bugs found with restoring the game from saved as well as the Hall of Fame.
