Silent Hill 2 fan patch fixes 20 year-old game breaking glitch

The Silent Hill 2: Enhanced Edition fan patch (not to be confused with the disastrous HD edition of the game on consoles) just got a 2.0 release that, among other changes, addresses a persistent crashing issue on multi-core processors that has plagued the game since its PC release 20 years ago.

Silent Hill 2 suffered similarly to other PC ports of the PS2 era, with a slate of graphical glitches and stability issues that have only gotten worse on newer hardware. The team behind the Enhanced Edition has been working on getting the game to as polished and playable a state as possible on modern systems. We've covered their work previously, most recently at the end of 2020.

In the initial release of Silent Hill 2, some quirk of the game's streaming audio engine caused it to play havoc with multi-core CPUs—practically every consumer processor made after the mid-2000s. During regular play, Silent Hill 2's audio would eventually start skipping, precipitating a crash. Up till now, playing Silent Hill 2 on PC required disabling all but one processor core in BIOS before playing, a cumbersome fix at best.

The Silent Hill 2: Enhanced Edition team rebuilt the game's streaming audio engine from scratch to ensure stability on multi-core CPUs, an extremely impressive technical achievement. This custom audio engine also cleans up some of Silent Hill 2's other hitches and stuttering, and the 2.0 update additionally introduces a host of other graphical adjustments and bug fixes.

The Enhanced Edition team put out some phenomenal work here, but you'll have a hard time enjoying it if you don't already have a physical copy of Silent Hill 2 on PC—the game is not available on any digital storefronts, and sellers are asking for upwards of $700 for physical copies on eBay.