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HOW-TO: Choose a game to load using .BAT files for MS-DOS

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First post, by bjwil1991

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When I was young, and today's kids and teens won't understand the struggles, I had to use the CD command to get into the directory for a specific game in MS-DOS.

Then, it dawned upon me: I asked myself "Would an MS-DOS batch file suffice to play a certain game?" I then searched online using the magic of Google for making a batch file that utilizes the choice program (defaults to Y/N) to choose a specific game to load.

I have an example of my games.bat file (in some memory, of course):

@echo off
echo Choose a game to load
echo.
@echo off
choice /c:abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234 /t:4,10 "Which game do you want to play "
echo.
@echo off
echo [ A - A10 B - BATMAN C - DOOM ]
echo...
echo...
echo...
echo...
echo...
echo...
echo...
echo...
echo [ 2 - TIE 3 - WC2 4 - EXIT    ]
echo.
@echo off
IF ERRORLEVEL 30 GOTO EXIT
..........
:A10
cd games
call a10.bat
goto exit
...
:EXIT
cd \
call mt32.bat
rem MT32.bat resets the Roland MT-32 to defaults

Then, the same game with different sound card options, such as this example:

@echo off
echo Space Quest III
echo.
@echo off
choice /c: IMTSX /t:X,10 "Which sound card would you like to use "
echo.
@echo off
echo [ I - IBM M - MT-32 T - Tandy ]
echo [ S - SB  X - Exit            ]
echo.
@echo off
IF ERRORLEVEL 5 GOTO EXIT
.....
:IBM
cd games
call sq3-i.bat
goto EXIT
....
:exit
cd \

Have any of you done this in the past, or currently? What are your thoughts? To me, it's a time saver and lifesaver (I made multiple directories for every game that has different sound card options to choose from) without typing in the CD command every time.

I did the same thing with my Windows 98SE machine after restarting the wireless repeater and/or connecting wirelessly since the DHCP doesn't seem to reset itself unless I made a batch file and have the file load at startup.

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Reply 1 of 4, by cyclone3d

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You can do much more than that with the built in menu ability in DOS. This ability was introduced in DOS 5.0

You can have a menu for config.sys in order to choose what drivers, memory management, etc. to load.

Then in the Autoexec.Bat file you can also have the same sort of menu system.

Once you get it going, it is a really nice setup. I used to use it all the time.

Here are a few guides that show how to set up these menus:
http://www.uncreativelabs.net/textfiles/dos/6-2MENU.TXT
http://smallvoid.com/article/dos-multiple-con … igurations.html
http://www.ybet.be/en-operating/en-dos-5.php

Batch files can be very powerful and useful.

I have seen batch files in the 50k thousand lines of code. Once you get so large, it seems like a really bad idea to me.. but it was commercial product so what do I know.

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Reply 2 of 4, by CrossBow777

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Also quite a few of the Menu programs back in the day, simply created batch files automatically to launch the programs from their menu system. Fast Menu Gold (what I use), does exactly this. Creates a batch in its local directory that will start the game you've chosen and the batch has a call to reload the menu program again when you exit the program you started. This way, the menu program isn't actually resident in memory at all.

I really miss the days of DOS sometimes. To me it was much simpler and much more reliable time to own and operate a PC compared to the bloated mess of the OSes we have today...

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Midi Modules: MT-32 (OLD), MT-200, MT-300, MT-90S, MT-90U, SD-20

Reply 3 of 4, by bjwil1991

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cyclone3d wrote:
You can do much more than that with the built in menu ability in DOS. This ability was introduced in DOS 5.0 […]
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You can do much more than that with the built in menu ability in DOS. This ability was introduced in DOS 5.0

You can have a menu for config.sys in order to choose what drivers, memory management, etc. to load.

Then in the Autoexec.Bat file you can also have the same sort of menu system.

Once you get it going, it is a really nice setup. I used to use it all the time.

Here are a few guides that show how to set up these menus:
http://www.uncreativelabs.net/textfiles/dos/6-2MENU.TXT
http://smallvoid.com/article/dos-multiple-con … igurations.html
http://www.ybet.be/en-operating/en-dos-5.php

Batch files can be very powerful and useful.

I have seen batch files in the 50k thousand lines of code. Once you get so large, it seems like a really bad idea to me.. but it was commercial product so what do I know.

I use that on every Windows 9x machine and it's amazing to do something like that for benchmarks, game playing, and so on.

Discord: https://discord.gg/U5dJw7x
Systems from the Compaq Portable 1 to Ryzen 9 5950X
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Reply 4 of 4, by gdjacobs

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For programs, if necessary I usually just create a menu screen(s) with matching .bat files to launch the indicated commands. I figure typing something like WP51 is fine for the unwashed.

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