I'm old

http://i.imgur.com/rT1m0.png

DEVICE=C:\Windows\HIMEM.SYS
DOS=HIGH,UMB
DEVICE=C:\Windows\EMM386.EXE NOEMS

@echo off
SET SOUND=C:\PROGRA~1\CREATIVE\CTSND
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 E620 T6
SET PATH=C:\Windows;C:\
LH C:\Windows\COMMAND\MSCDEX.EXE /D:123

troll alert

Yeah, I saw that earlier. And no, if you think about it, it's not necessarily a troll. Windows XP came out in what, 2002? And it didn't include any way to access the DOS shell without bending over backwards and jumping through a flaming hoop while muttering an incantation in Sanskrit. It's not too hard to believe that kids who are now posting on Reddit have no idea what DOS is.

Also DE, you forgot the most important command (though not necessarily for DOOM):

C:\mouse

I'm really getting old!

Navy, I don't think you meant to say DOS shell, because that in itself was a GUI for DOS.

No, I think the way it was architected, DOS shell is correct. And GUI stands for "Graphical" User Interface - which DOS was not.

..I remember playing around with .bat files trying like heck to get EF2000 to run faster....

One of the releases for Jane's ATF included an apology regarding DOS only compatibility. I recall having to shell out to DOS as well to run the game with a special .bat script. That was under Win 95.

I remember trying to get Aces over Europe to run...

Needed a high amount of Main memory, I had so many separate boot disks. Hard to believe it's all in the past.

I bought, but could never get Jane's ATF to run..really torked me off too.

btw, Happy Birthday Boilerplate! Hope your having a good one.

I meant DOS command line, actually... Brain fart from studying C all day.

As I recall, Win 98 was the last (major) release that was actually built on DOS, whereas from XP onward, the only way to get to a command line prompt was via starting in Safe Mode.

I remember my grandfather and I spending the better part of a spring break one year trying to get Falcon 3.0 to run from a boot disk, and having to tweak the autoexec.bat down as much as possible.

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

Total War owes at least a small part of their money from me to Ancient Art of War. Go Compaq!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdgwPOf2BCA

Christ, you guys ARE old . Windows 95 was my first OS, didn't touch the DOS side of things, my old man did it for me.

Old age and treachery will always triumph over youth and skill..

Oh yeah those were the days...

You know what's great? Over the course of 3 days I got more games working smoothly in DOSBox than I ever did in actual DOS. I never could get EF2000, Operation Overlord, SVGA Harrier or Naval Strike working right! Now I have all tis workin in DOSBox:

Armored Fist
A-10 Tank Killer
Red Baron
Aces Over Europe
Aces of the Deep
Aces of the Pacific
Indycar Racing II
Dawn Patrol
F-14 Tomcat
Wings of Glory
Hind
Apache
EF 2000
Su 27 Flanker
Tornado
Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe
Gunship 2000
USNF
ATF
Knights of the Sky
Chuck Yeager's Air Combat
Flight Unlimited
Strike Commander
SVGA Harrier
Jet Fighter II
1942 Pacific Air War
B-17 Flying Fortress
Comanche
Dog Fight
F-14 Fleet Defender Gold
F-15 Strike Eagle II
F-15 Strike Eagle III
F-117A
Falcon 3.0
Fighter Bomber
Harrier Jump Jet
Heroes of the 357th
Megafortress
Megarace 2
Operation Overlord
Pacific Strike
Red Storm Rising
Task Force 1942
The Blue Max
Wolfenstein 3d
Doom
Doom II

Ha! MY first PC wouldn't have had the MSCDEX.EXE line, because CD-ROMs hadn't come out yet. I seem to remember "win" being the last line in autoexec.bat, meaning Windows 3 (not 3.1.) The OS was DOS 3, and I was using QEMM instead of DOS' extended memory manager.

Nah, it's not hidden or anything. It's in the start menu as the Command Prompt, or you can do Start>Run and end cmd.exe. You're probably thinking of the "Safe Mode with Command Prompt" option which is just... well, safe mode that lets you access the command prompt. But, that isn't DOS - Windows XP and newer dumped DOS entirely with the switch to the NT kernel. DOS isn't present at all.

Tornado was one I had the most problems with, and was most glad that CDs came along as sitting there installing Win 3.11 then putting the software back on your 50MB HDD was such a pain and took forever
I still have a HDD for my old laptop with DOS 6.3 on it for some applications

But then again I remember using CP/M