badmojo wrote:

I rediscovered the menu I used back in the day and I'm loving it. It's called Power Menu, and it is quite powerful. Lots of conf […]
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I rediscovered the menu I used back in the day and I'm loving it. It's called Power Menu, and it is quite powerful. Lots of config options and only takes up about 3K of memory. It's great to have easy access to all of the stuff on my HDD - here I was using the command line like neanderthal man.

It can be found here under the link "Power Menu 4.11": http://toastytech.com/guis/indexlinks.html

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Does it stay resident in memory when you start the games and programs?

I remember using that one. And yes, I think it stays resident.

The only menu program I encountered that somehow did not stay resident was Norton Menu, included with The Norton Desktop for DOS (and probably a few other Norton-related things).

Bummer. 🙁 I hated menu programs that would do that.

fantasma wrote:

There is this fancy launcher that imitates the ScummVM GUI, by the maker of GR-LIDA: GRlDOS. Looks good, I haven't tried it myself though.

I just tried GRLDOS a little.
-It works in pure DOS.
-It can be set to an English interface.
-Besides setting the game/program, it can direct to a setup program, and some before and after command.
-You need to start the menu with a bat file, the menu writes another bat file, the menu unloads entirely and then the selected game/program is executed.
This approach results around +-200 bytes of memory taken by the menu system.
-The menu selection moves way too fast on a computer from 2011.

Still, Not bad at all.

I'm still in love with Gekko Menu 2.0 by Gekko Software GmbH.
It was shareware and we registered it for our youth club association that needed to somehow add a user system to the DOS/WfW 3.11 machine.
The software is great but I can no longer find it on the web in any form. I contacted the developers years ago (2006) and they confirmed that my license was still valid (I kept the Youth Club license and after the association disbanded some years ago, I doubt anyone would mind). I wanted to ask them to make it freeware or at least put the shareware up but somehow I didn't pursue it further... But I'll give it another try to persuade them to open the software now (http://www.gekko-software.de http://www.gekkosoft.com/index.htm)

I was unable to make my registered version into an unregistered version again 🙁

Samir wrote:

Bummer. 🙁 I hated menu programs that would do that.

FYI, Access does not stay resident but uses some batch file trickery to do its thing. That being said, I would expect more menus to work similarly, but I don't know any examples.

Dominus wrote:

I'm still in love with Gekko Menu 2.0 by Gekko Software GmbH.

Psst: You know it's Savage Empire and not Savage Dreams, right? 😉

He he... Yeah. No idea how that happened

rcblanke wrote:

Samir wrote:

Bummer. 🙁 I hated menu programs that would do that.

FYI, Access does not stay resident but uses some batch file trickery to do its thing. That being said, I would expect more menus to work similarly, but I don't know any examples.

Sweet! I know a lot of the menu programs back then would use that trick of writing a batch file and then executing that batch after they end which launched the program and then back to the menu. 😎

Dominus wrote:

I'm still in love with Gekko Menu 2.0 by Gekko Software GmbH.

That looks quite nice. 😎 It was hard to find good running graphical menus back in the day. And dosshell sucked, 🤣.

Does anyone remember the name of the quite primitive EGA mode menu system that has a star-field background? It was a commercial software and my local computer shops were running it in their brand new 386/486's. From memory it only had about eight entries available at a time.

Some of the classics I remember being on the list:

Stellar 7
Airborne Ranger
Diehard
Operation Wolf
Aaargh!
Grand Prix Circuit
Vette!

😀

badmojo wrote:

I rediscovered the menu I used back in the day and I'm loving it. It's called Power Menu, and it is quite powerful. Lots of conf […]
Show full quote

I rediscovered the menu I used back in the day and I'm loving it. It's called Power Menu, and it is quite powerful. Lots of config options and only takes up about 3K of memory. It's great to have easy access to all of the stuff on my HDD - here I was using the command line like neanderthal man.

It can be found here under the link "Power Menu 4.11": http://toastytech.com/guis/indexlinks.html

/

I love coming across sites like that one, I spend hours enjoying the content! Thanks for sharing!!

I used to use Magee's Automenu which was retail IIRC

On the old PC-XT (Amstrad PC1512 with 30Mo) I just made a little batch menu.

On my Pentium 166 system, I want something more powerful and faster because I think I will have more than 150 games to choose from.

I have no problem with DOS command but it's sometimes difficult to remember the right .EXE or .BAT or .COM to launch to play the game.

I think I will give a try to Access :
http://members.quicknet.nl/blankendaalr/

Do you have any comment about this one ?

DataPro wrote:

On the old PC-XT (Amstrad PC1512 with 30Mo) I just made a little batch menu. […]
Show full quote

On the old PC-XT (Amstrad PC1512 with 30Mo) I just made a little batch menu.

On my Pentium 166 system, I want something more powerful and faster because I think I will have more than 150 games to choose from.

I have no problem with DOS command but it's sometimes difficult to remember the right .EXE or .BAT or .COM to launch to play the game.

I think I will give a try to Access :
http://members.quicknet.nl/blankendaalr/

Do you have any comment about this one ?

That seems like a really great menu program. 😎 Pretty recent support too. Thank you for posting the link.

I'm currently running MS-DOS Shell under MS-DOS 6.22. It came as a supplement for MS-DOS 6 to 6.22 as it was not included by default.

Right now, my MS-DOS 6.22 installation is occuping the first 2 GB partitions (C:, D: and E:) on 3 virtual hard disks (16 GB each for a total of 48 GB) installed under Microsoft Virtual PC 2007. The OS/2 Warp 4 FAT partitions are drives F:, G: and H:. Drive X: is the virtual CD-ROM drive.

I'm able to setup up a lot of software by setting up menu groups and menu entries inside it. Right now, the size of the DOSSHELL.INI file is about 38.4 KB. There could be a bug where if for some reason, the size of the DOSSHELL.INI file gets too big, MS-DOS Shell could stop working.

Also, MS-DOS shell as a bug where if it tries to search more than 65,535 files on a FAT32 formatted drive or a directory that has been mapped as a drive over a network, the counter will wrap around to 0. This is because MS-DOS Shell uses 16-bit counters to calculate total number of files on the drive.

Have a look:

Right now, my MS-DOs 6.22 installation is using a grand total of 2.28 GB in 1,142 directories and 19,992 user files!

Wow, I think that's the most I've ever seen Dosshell ever used! Since most systems back in the day had to be fast enough to run win3.1 for dosshell, everyone pretty much just ran win31 and used the file manager. Man, I miss file manager. I just remembered how bad explorer sucks. 🙁

Samir wrote:

That seems like a really great menu program. 😎 Pretty recent support too. Thank you for posting the link.

You're welcome.

I think I will test it tonight or tomorrow.

Samir wrote:

Wow, I think that's the most I've ever seen Dosshell ever used! Since most systems back in the day had to be fast enough to run win3.1 for dosshell, everyone pretty much just ran win31 and used the file manager. Man, I miss file manager. I just remembered how bad explorer sucks. 🙁

Yeah. Since my boot drive has nearly 10,000 files, MS-DOS Shell even throws a "Not Enough Memory" error when I try to select All Files in the View menu! 🙁

Wow! How do you have that many files? Are they programs or data?

You know about the 512 file limit in the root directory of the drive, right?