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DOS games and Windows 3.11

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Reply 20 of 29, by Samir.Habib

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Ok) Now I clear up my mind, because I’m f course I felt much more comfortable in Win9X and XP GI, but all off you just help me to realize, that my thoughts were mistakeble. Ok now my lazy fingers will type all commands in DOS, and Windows will be using for file management only. My mind just still don’t want to believe in it.))))

Reply 21 of 29, by Jo22

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^ If you feel more comfortable with a GUI, you can try Norton Commander or MS-DOS Shell.
DOS Shell came with DOS 5 and 6.0, I recall. It is also part of the fourth extra disk for DOS 6.2x.
It can be downloaded for free, I recall. Back then, the files of the 4th disk was also available on the Microsoft FTP servers
as an archive (ZIP, LHA, etc. or self-extractor.

But beware, the "official" 4th disk only contained English releases of the DOS 6.0 programs that were removed in 6.2.
In essence, the inclusion of that "extra" disk was just a half-hearted attempt in keeping previous users satisfied.
If you're using another language version of DOS, just install DOS 6.2 over your old DOS 6.0 installation and you have the complete set of DOS 6.x in non-English.
Or expand the files manually using expand utility. Anyway, these are just ideas. There were many GUIs for DOS. 😀
FreeGEM/OpenGEM and SEAL2, too, for just to name a few. Though SEAL2 may uses an extender, not sure.

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Reply 22 of 29, by gdjacobs

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There's an old saying:
"Graphical interfaces make easy tasks easier and difficult tasks impossible." It still applies in the Windows world. If you want to get something really tricky done when it comes to system administration, you're probably still going to need the command line.

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Reply 23 of 29, by Cyberdyne

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Hey you can use Volkov Commander, it is small, basically only one executable file, and you cand run it from autoexec.bat, and all your games work. Just point and click. It is more memory conservative, and functional, than Norton Commander.

I am aroused about any X86 motherboard that has full functional ISA slot. I think i have problem. Not really into that original (Turbo) XT,286,386 and CGA/EGA stuff. So just a DOS nut.

Reply 24 of 29, by yawetaG

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Samir.Habib wrote:

As I remember, WinG it’s a early Microsoft attempt to create something like DirectX. So when I’m using Win 3.11 just as GUI under my DOS 6.22, and I want enter games directory, then select Doom directory, and finally just double click exe file..... But what happens next? I thought that Windows must drop me to the real DOS mode, but from your words, it’s something like virtual machine?

Nothing like that, because just like DirectX the games need to be written for it specifically to work with it. If there were a Doom for Windows that was developed with the WinG SDK (software development kit), it would use WinG. DOS Doom? No chance.

Reply 25 of 29, by Samir.Habib

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Today i tried Norton Commander 5.0 1995 version, which helped me run all games exe i wanted before. All games runs fine, setup.exe, game lunch.exe. So now i understand why in all youtube videos people just using DOS & types commands over there. But when i was a kid, my mom took me to her work, it was in 1995 before Windows 95 arrived, and there i saw a lot of PC's with Windows 3.11& Norton Commander. I used NC to run between directories, and i 100% remember that all games started normally.

Reply 27 of 29, by GigAHerZ

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Cyberdyne wrote:

Hey you can use Volkov Commander, it is small, basically only one executable file, and you cand run it from autoexec.bat, and all your games work. Just point and click. It is more memory conservative, and functional, than Norton Commander.

Norton Commander uses almost no memory at all when running another application. It can unload itself quite well to execute other programs and reload itself, when other program is closed.
You can also load NC into high memory, therefore not consuming even a few kB of conv. memory.

Not sure VC has this capability and if it doesn't, i would expect NC to be better on memory front.

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - And i intend to get every last bit out of it even after loading every damn driver!

Reply 28 of 29, by root42

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I always suggest using the freeware DOS Controller (https://www.bttr-software.de/freesoft/fileman1.htm) by Soren Kragh. I love it because it is teeny tiny and ultra fast. It has some limitations, but it will do 96% of the stuff you need.

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