Hello, I've been having a frustrating time trying to get Doom 2 working again on my Win98 SE system in Real DOS mode.

The weird thing is that it was working before, until I went on a spree of installing a few DOS and Windows 3.1 games and programs.

The point at which it hangs is immediately after the "DOS/4GW" text comes on the screen, so I thought the problem may be related to DOS/4GW. However, games like Warcraft 1 which also use DOS/4GW continue to work properly, so I am not sure.

My first instinct was to try and boot Doom 2 using a minimal (no mouse and no sound) CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT. So essentially nothing in AUTOEXEC.BAT but the following combinations of CONFIG.SYS. I should also mention that Doom 2 setup was set so sound was disabled on both music and FX.

[Nothing in CONFIG.SYS]

and

DOS=HIGH,UMB

and

DOS=HIGH,UMB
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS

Eventually I thought the problem may be related to the PATH bug in DOS/4GW because all those Windows 3.1 applications dumped themselves into the Windows folder, so I thought maybe they implicitly made the PATH really long. I also tried adding "SET PATH=" to AUTOCONFG.BAT but it made no difference.

So I am really stumped, even though other programs work, Doom 2 just won't stop hanging. It actually runs perfectly in Windows without Real DOS (but I don't get any sound that way because the drivers only work for my card in DOS so it's not a practical option). And it DID work in Real DOS perfectly before! Arghhh.

Not sure if this is related, but a lot of programs (like Warcraft setup or Doom setup) hang on start up for me (Flight Simulator 5.1 hangs on the title screen though) now when I get into DOS through the Restart in MS-DOS mode. If I just boot up Real DOS during initial Windows boot up the programs work fine.

Thank you. I would greatly appreciate any help.