Found this in my copy of Wing Commander 2. We've come a long way from the dark days of getting DOS games running!
My favourite part is "The entire installation may take several hours of your time" and of course the overuse of VERY 🤣
Ultima 7 is another infamously hard game to get running, Voodoo memory manager my arse.
Which DOS games have you found difficult or impossible to make work?
It took me a long time to get T2: The Arcade Game working with all the necessary drivers alongside it - it has VERY high conventional memory requirements but I got there in the end.
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Are we talking of real DOS, or getting DOS games to run on emulation?
I remember that I had trouble running Mortal Kombat on a 486 with 4 MB RAM, but it worked after enabling DOS4GW paging.
Later I had 16 MB, and then 32 MB, so almost everything worked, until games started requiring Pentium and 64 MB.
The game that I had most trouble with, was Wing Commander: Privateer. It really didn't like my highly tweaked config.sys/autoexec.bat configuration, with numerous drivers and TSRs all put into upper memory to conserve conventional memory. I ended up with a boot menu with separate item specifically for Privateer.
When talking of newer computers, I put considerable effort to get Tomb Raider, Blood and Redneck Rampage running natively on XP with working SB sound, CD-Audio music and 3dfx emulation (for TR).
Yeah, U7 is the one that stands out in my mind. It seems like there was another game, but I can't remember which, that had a super high conventional memory requirement (like over 610KB).
The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.
OPL3 FM vs. Roland MT-32 vs. General MIDI DOS Game Comparison
Let's benchmark our systems with cache disabled
DOS PCI Graphics Card Benchmarks
Off the top of my head I used to not be able to get the X-Wing Collectors ed to start in the day for some reason while the disk version worked fine. The original Xwing really stressed to use extended memory however
System Shock was also hard to start for me, and Cybermage is hard to play without getting segfaults as well. I think there's something in.....common...with these 😀
Spectrum Holobyte's Falcon 3.0
Ultima 7 was easy. Wing Commander 2 was a bit of an arse, but that was mostly because at the time I was running DOS 4.01...
Recently, it's definitely Tie Fighter. SVGA, joystick, *and* MIDI, without running into the pausing bug requires two sound cards in a very specific configuration.
Likewise any game that insists on soundblasters in a certain IRQ/port configuration.
for games with almost unrealistic conventional memory needs, wouldnt you just go for os/2? someone here posted a vid about it and allegedly some Warp version could get more than 640K for your dos program, or was that just b/s?
OS/2 is a lot easier in some ways to use than DOS for DOS games, as all the settings can be set through a dialog box rather than config files.
It can't achieve the impossible, though - more than 640K is granted in exactly the same way as through real DOS - using unused display memory, which in reality is useless.
It runs IBM DOS under a 16 bit virtual machine, with quite a lot of control. It's also possible if you want to run your own 16 bit real mode operating system (MSDOS, CP/M).
Ultima VII won't run, because it requires protected mode, and OS/2 is already controlling that. DOS/4GW apps are fine.
So, basically for some games it's easy to get them working, and others it's a tad more tricky. Obviously at the time it was amazing, as other programs would be running in the background at the same time as the game was running.
I used to be a huge OS/2 fan, but I'm not sure I'd install it just to run DOS games. I have it installed partly for that, partly for native OS/2 games (mostly Galactic Civilisations 2), and a number of native OS/2 apps.
With DOS 6, multiple configs, careful use of high memory, umbs, and mouse/cd drivers with low memory usage, it's not really difficult to meet memory requirements. When it was DOS 4, running on a 286 which couldn't use UMB memory, things were more fraught (I ran WC2 in that way, it was a tad slow)
wrote:OS/2 is a lot easier in some ways to use than DOS for DOS games, as all the settings can be set through a dialog box rather than […]
OS/2 is a lot easier in some ways to use than DOS for DOS games, as all the settings can be set through a dialog box rather than config files.
It can't achieve the impossible, though - more than 640K is granted in exactly the same way as through real DOS - using unused display memory, which in reality is useless.
It runs IBM DOS under a 16 bit virtual machine, with quite a lot of control. It's also possible if you want to run your own 16 bit real mode operating system (MSDOS, CP/M).
Ultima VII won't run, because it requires protected mode, and OS/2 is already controlling that. DOS/4GW apps are fine.
So, basically for some games it's easy to get them working, and others it's a tad more tricky. Obviously at the time it was amazing, as other programs would be running in the background at the same time as the game was running.
I used to be a huge OS/2 fan, but I'm not sure I'd install it just to run DOS games. I have it installed partly for that, partly for native OS/2 games (mostly Galactic Civilisations 2), and a number of native OS/2 apps.
With DOS 6, multiple configs, careful use of high memory, umbs, and mouse/cd drivers with low memory usage, it's not really difficult to meet memory requirements. When it was DOS 4, running on a 286 which couldn't use UMB memory, things were more fraught (I ran WC2 in that way, it was a tad slow)
Isn't OS/2 itself hard to get running though?
OS/2 isn't difficult to get running on the right hardware, it's if random hardware is chosen that problems are encountered. Unsurprisingly if you try and use a 2016 PC to run Warp 4, an operating system from 1996, you may have some issues to solve. eComstation is one (expensive) way round that.
Patching OS/2 is the more tedious task, although there are tools to both patch and make CD bootable the install media.
I use it because I have a fairly long history in it, and a lot of software I bought at the time. I'm not sure I'd recommend it for anyone nowadays; if you have a burning desire to run Galciv 2, it's best run under virtualisation. I finally stopped using OS/2 as my main OS in 1999, and don't really miss it much.
I just got Ultima 7 running, but the version I have seems to make it very easy. Its the version on CD that came with other Ultima games bundled. It makes a boot disk for you so getting it running was easy. The only problem I am having now is that I have no sound. I think this is because I am using on board sound on an old IBM Aptiva with a 166 Cyrix chip and Alladin chipset, at least this is my assumption. I am in the process of looking for an ISA card. I have an old 8 bit Opl2 based card, but I think it would be only good for my turbo XT.
Tommaso72
I have seen your video Phil and I really like the way you set it up, I am going to try that next. Thanks for all the great videos, I really enjoy watching them.
Tommaso72
wrote:I have this boot menu with different memory options and haven't run into a game that doesn't run.
For conventional only, loading the CD-ROM drive costs a lot of memory.
Me too, although I made a configuration with limited EMS for Privateer to run without distorted audio.
All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder
wrote:I have this boot menu with different memory options and haven't run into a game that doesn't run.
For conventional only, loading the CD-ROM drive costs a lot of memory.
I've just used Your menu (config and autoexec) - games start running nicely, thanks. After that i installed sb16 drivers so everytihing works fine.
I've played Dune 2 (exp mem with mouse), Darkseed and Doom - everything perfect
But I have few problems with games:
1. Settlers - when i start game it doesn't run and return to dos (some dos4gw error i post when i come back home from work) - edit - I've managed to run Settlers but couldn't run intro
2. Alladin - soundsetup works fine, but when start geme it returns to dos with no error info, nothing - edit -16 MB was the issue, but it runs very slow on 486 dx 2 66
3. I have some directories on cd with long names (i can open in win7 but in dos in NC i can open only directories with short names, the rest of directories after copying on harddrive is empty, and trying to get inside directory on cd - nothing happens (entering dir with no reaction) - is it connected with long names of the dirs? - edited problem was long nam of the dir FAT 16 doesnt recognize
