This is related to the DOS and Windows versions of Monopoly Deluxe, Virgin games, 1992.

I managed to pick up an original copy of the Windows version, and have it installed and working fine on my Windows 3.1 machine. But - it's a bit buggy. I know they released a patch for the DOS version to upgrade it from 1.0 to 1.5 which fixed bugs and adds features - but did they release a patch for the Windows version as well? I've not found any info about that. I'd expect that they'd want to keep both versions supported and patched.

Meanwhile, the DOS version - uh - how does anyone get this piece of garbage to run? I have a 486 machine with 64MB of RAM that dual boots to DOS 6.22 and Windows 95. Booting to DOS, I cannot get this version to run at all - bombs right back out to a prompt. I found the patch disk, and ran the patch, and that made a small change - instead of bombing out to a prompt with no indication of what went wrong, it bombs out with a completely false and useless error of not enough memory. I'm fairly certain 64MB of RAM for this era of software is more than enough, but not too much to be causing errors - I'm within the range that this mobo supports. So, trying to find a way to make it work, I booted to the 95 partition, booting directly to a command prompt. The game runs - but no mouse. I'm guessing 95 needs to start up to the GUI for a driver to start up? So I booted to Windows 95, and ran the monopoly.bat file from the GUI, and it opened a DOS full screen session and started up fine. Selected players and such, and went to start the game - it freezes. Had to ctrl-alt-delete to get back to Windows with the task manager, and force it closed. So - I restarted to a command prompt on the Windows 95 installation/partition. Ran it from there - I get the not enough memory error. 3 different results in the same damn OS.

I've not been having this much trouble with other software on this machine, I believe the hardware is all in good order and the installations are stable. But - I don't exactly know Windows 3.1 and 95 like I know more current versions, I never supported them professionally.

Another issue I have is that I was playing around with the 1995 CD Rom version of Monopoly on this machine - which should work in 3.1 and 95, and has a 33MHz minimum requirement for processor, I'm running a 66MHz 486, so I'm meeting all the specs, and the CD ROM drive is an IDE 48x that was kicking around in the parts bin, so I should be meeting all the requirements for it to run adequately - but all the animations run choppy, slow, freeze, run a bit, freeze, run a bit......very poor performance. I mean, I know it's old hardware, and probably pretty close to the bottom of the range of acceptable hardware for this game. But the game advertises specs that I'm meeting, and if I bought this new back in the day, loaded it, and it performed like this, I'd be calling the manufacturer. It is not running at an acceptable level. The performance level was the same on both my 3.1 and 95 partitions on the computer. Are there configuration tricks I should be playing with to improve video or CD ROM performance on the machine?