I’m bummed! I cant seem to play any of my old “DOS games” through
my new(er)computer (just upgraded from a P-90 to a P-II 266 -DON’T Laugh!)
so now when I restart in DOS mode, to play a game, I only get music OR sound effects
but not both, or the machine just freezes up, try to play the older
ones through windows and most of the games don’t like it.
As I recall from the days when I first had an 8088, you had to
place some commands in the autoexect.bat regarding handels, stacks
and such. I have put all this stuff on a dos menu system but have
yet to find one (a menu) that has a GUI interface (for my 6 year
old) yet doesn’t rob memory. Having a 196 megs of memory, I cant
buy it when the game says there is a memory allocation error.
so any one got any configuration hints that will let me play my
old games the way they were designed?
IANAComputer Tech, but it does sound like a memory allocation error. I had a passel of old DOS games that became practically unuseable when Win 95/98 came out. Here’s the problem…DOS can only utilize the first 1 Mb of memory. The first 680kb of memory are the important stuff, because most game programs can only use that. The remaining 320kb are Upper Memory (UMB) memory that con only be used when himem.sys is running in your config.sys file. Windows 95/98/Me can use any part of memory to load files (that’s what it’s designed to do), but TSR files (terminate and stay resident) and device drivers all try to load into that space when the DOS emulation is started (that’s a big reason why Win after 98 did away with the MS-DOS restart - most DOS programs can run in WinMe fairly stably, and MS probably figured the market wasn’t going to cry too loudly, since no one has written a DOS-only program in at least 6 years).
In order to get your DOS programs running, you’re probably going to have to create a special DOS shell with its own autoexec.bat and config.sys (any good Win95 for Dummies book can show you how; the steps involved are too long for this post). However, most DOS games are memory hogs, and won’t work with less than about 540 kb of free lower memory (out of 640k). That leaves 100k of memory to load the mouse driver, the BIOS, the video drivers, etc. It goes without saying that most CD drivers will overload the RAM to the point that memory-intensive games (Wing Commander & WC Privateer were my worst problems) won’t work, and you’ll get a memory overload error.
Absent the option to reload MS-DOS with its own autoexec.bat and config.sys, you might go up to come down…that is, pick up a copy of WinME, which has done away with the MS-DOS mode, because it uses a new algoritm to create a DOS shell that MAY be stable enough to run your old DOS program, but no guarantees.
You may have a graphics card, or sound card that is not recognized by DOS when it is installed with a Win98 driver. Drivers are the deeps of hell, by the way.
So, you get a BOOT UP floppy, load it with DOS drivers for the appropriate hardware, (Which you may be able to find on the Web, if you are very lucky.) including HIMEM.SYS, and an autoexec bat that assigns a path to your games, and to the DOS files themselves. Then you reboot with the floppy in, Then you find out that the action based games you loved at sixteen megahertz are way our of your league at 266.
On the topic of DOS games, is there any decent freeware that can make the really old games playable? I played a fun submarine game called GATO on my super-fast 12mhz 286, but if I try it on this machine (a celeron of much faster speed), it just zooms by.
I remember a bit of software that would slow down the 12Mhz computer so that really old games could be played on it… no one ever learns any lessons in the computer industry.
Yep. moslo is the most well known, but it can be a pain to use, and I have had problems with it freezing my 'puter. Unfortunately, moslo.com is up for sale, but a Google search for “moslo” should bring up any number of download sites.
Wikkit: There is a metric assload of MS-DOS freeware programs online (there are probably more MS-DOS freeware progs than freeware for any other OS, bar none (and no, GPL’d software is not freeware)), and Google lists most of it.
(MS-DOS probably has so much software because it was the only DOS to do much of anything past the early days, so it profited from a huge glut of generic DOS software that would run on any DOS-type OS. There was very little difference between the various competing DOSes.)
[bold]Wikkit[/bold] MoSlo is your answer, thanks all for your help,
I think the special boot floppy is the ticket, I set it up and let
ya’-alls know how it went