Gawd..

Although these games were fun, it could be incredibly frustrating to run them. So much trial and error.

BTW Piper.. thank for the B-day wishes.

There were no video games prior to Windows, everyone knows that.

I believe with the advent of Win 95, there was a transition period where many games written for DOS were challenged to run under a Windows only. The were many heartbreaks going on.

Alrighty then, who remembers memmaker?

Feck, do I? I feel like I WROTE IT!

memmaker was useful for the games that supported the higher memory addressing, but rather useless for those that didn't.
Apparently there is a boot disk in this house somewhere that has a boot menu which optimises memory allocation per game. I must find that a some point and image it...

Reminds me of a nostalgia trip I went on a few days ago. Elite 2: Frontier - an entire galaxy on a disk, and each system has just the same cardboard character as an NPC in morrowind or oblivion - but 4000 times smaller, and still somehow more awesome...

In the dawn of Internet gaming I remember being in a squad flying Jane's ATF/NATO Fighters DOS version. We were using a freeware IPX emulator KAHN (an alternative to the much fuller featured KALI) over 28K modems. It required loading a complex network stack and carefully crafting the autoexec.bat and stack loading .bat files to leave enough memory for ATF to run. I think ATF required a huge amount of conventional RAM (over 500K!!!!!!!) so it was always a struggle. Once a satisfactory arrangement was found, it was shared around and revered.

Voice chat??? HAHAHAHAH not even a dream at that point. Text Chat through KAHN shell and the in game interface, squadron meetings via IRC channel.

Sometime later, an Internet friend and I did each buy the same brand of DSVD modems so we COULD actually have voice chat when connected with ATF/NATO DOS. He lived on the West Coast and I on the East Coast, and we also played around with various phone company plans to moderate the Long Distance charges.

I remember dragging my Gateway Tower to a Falcon3 LAN party once as well, scrounging up a network card from work and struggling to load the required driver stack. Finally got connected and ended up frying my modem in the process.

Good Times!! Good Times!!

Then ATF GOLD came out with native TCP/IP connections... Roger Wilco arrived for voice comms and the whole 'game' changed radically.

Maybe this will help you


http://www.infocellar.com/winxp/DOS-with-XP.htm


Cheers

Oh yeah,

the "fun" of high-loading as much as possible to squeeze every single bit out of the main-memory, because game x needed at least 617k or something. I don`t know, how many boot-disks I had floating around.

I had the same problem, and that was the first or second game I ever bought for PC/DOS...so AOE was the game that taught me how to juggle memory managers, mouse drivers, and CDROM drivers to get that 614K that AOE need. Even the order of loading the drivers made a difference. What a pain in the A.

at one point I called sierra/dynamix for help and they mailed me a boot disk - of course that didn't work either! LOL