I was in CyberExchange today, and saw a game I had really enjoyed playing a few years back on my Atari ST. I bought it, and came home only to find it’s DOS based. I installed it, opened a dos window, and ran the game. The intro plays fine, but then the game ends, and the DOS window just says “bye” in it. Anyone have any ideas on what this means and how I might be able to play this game? Thanks.
Oh, I run Windows ME on an 800Mhz P III with 256 mb RAM. And ME desent have the “restart in DOS mode” option from the start menu.
Starting with Windows 98, Microsoft decided it wasn’t worth it to continue 100% ms-dos compatibility. So some ms-dos programs stopped working with 98. Windows ME and 2000 are even worse. At my company it was a huge issue because a few of our statistics packages only run in DOS.
Being a programmer myself I would guess that it has to do with the protected memory management system. DOS Games used to write directly to the video memory for speed, but in a protected memory system you have to first request access to the video ram otherwise you get a blue screen and a general fault protection error. Then all you can do is give it a three-fingered salute.
You can partition your hard-drive and run an old version of dos on it but I don’t think it will be worth the hassle involved.
What game is it, Dave? Maybe you could find an emulated version that will work.
I can almost guarantee you that there’s a Windows-based Atari ST emulator out there (do a Google search for “Atari ST Emulator”). All you need then is the ROM for the game, which you can probably find with another Google search; assuming you own the original game, you can legally download this ROM.
Going this route will guarantee you get the same gameplay you did on the real ST, whereas the DOS version likely has differences.
Weirddave I have frequently found this kind of problem with old DOS games. My PC is an old P200MMx with Win95 OSR2.Most usually in my case it turned out to be caused by insufficient free conventional memory. Checking the base memory requiremnts of the game and using the ‘mem’ command usually indicated if this was a likely cause and then fiddling with autoexec.bat and config.sys often solved my problem. Wouldn’t recommend this unless you know what you are doing and/or enjoy hours of education on ancient O/Ss and rebooting.
I think the suggestion of looking for an emulated version for the ST (or maybe amiga) is far better.
The game is “Dungeon Master”-(II, to be exact,) And i actually have the Atari discs. I also have WinSTon, the ST emulator,but never found a DM program for it. Was a kinda crappy emulator anyway, havent touched it in years.
Ummmm, did you mean to post this in MPSIMS Dave?
I now this might sound kinda obvious, but did you actually restart in DOS mode, or just open a DOS window?
Is restarting in DOS even an option for ME?
This site has the game for Amiga, with a link to an Amiga emulator. It’s amazing how people hang on to these old games.
Me? I’m off to the White House to catch a thief…
Balance,
Thanks. I got the Emulator working, and found the games I wanted. Now I just have to figure out the ins and outs of how WinUAE works. Thanks again!
Just in case for the future for ME only.
To boot to Dos you MUSt use the boot disk.
The MSDOS shortcut should be in the windows directory, drag it to the desktop.