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monkeyb wrote:

Hey fellas, […]
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Hey fellas,

I built myself a 386 over the past year and finally have everything pretty much sorted out... DOS + Windows 3.1, and all hardware setup and working properly, but I'm struggling because a lot of games seem to crash.

Some work fine, but others often times either just hang on execution where nothing happens (and I'm forced to reset the computer) and others will terminate with a range of cryptic error messages.

Not sure if it's worth trying to tackle these one by one, or if there may be some other general underlying issue here like... maybe the RAM is faulty (Windows and other software runs fine though)? Or some BIOS settings or something?

Any thoughts/suggestions are welcome 😀

Thanks

I think we need more information about the computer configuration or we'd just be guessing.
Sound card? Video card? Autoexec.bat and config.sys entries?
What are the "cryptic error messages" you're getting? (maybe someone will recognize them)
Which games are affected?

I agree with the above comment by skitters.

Apart from your hardware setup, you also need to check your individual games' hardware requirements.
Does your setup meet the minimum requirements for these games to run properly?
Some games doesn't like to run with an expanded memory manager (like EMM386.EXE). Do you have enough free conventional memory? Are you trying to run some of your DOS games from within Windows 3.1?

Another factor to consider is that if some of these games were developed to be run on much older hardware (like an XT based PC), chances are that your 386 is "too fast" and the game will crash or simply fail to respond.

I would ensure that your system hardware is running soundly before blaming any particular game. I'm not sure what your hardware specs are, but it would be wise to run MemTest v4.00 overnight at least. Run Doom timedemo3 a few times in series. Run some hardware stability tests, especially ones which utilise a lot of data on the ISA bus, such as HDD access and video tests.

I have seen it where the ISA division option in CMOS was backwards, so instead of dividing by more to produce a small ISA freq, it increased! You should ensure that your ISA bus is between 7-10 MHz, preferably 8 MHz for testing. You may also want to set your cache and RAM wait states to a little longer for testing, then determine that fastest wait states for a stable system.

Once you are confident that the hardware is stable, you can dig into the specific game requirements.

I would suspect ram first, hd second.

As above. In addition, run a scope check on your voltage rails to see if you have any DC regulation issues (if you have access).

I had a similar problem that boiled down to bad TAG + Cache ram.

Games that hang... could be games that require pentium level instruction sets. I ran into this on my last 486 build. more often than not ones that would persistantly hang needed a pentium class. which games persistantly hang (ie: its repeatable, ALWAYS)