I've done a LOT of testing on many different systems over the past two years using a mix of original & replacement drivers and I found the following:
- CTMOUSE is not worth it - way too many games have issues with it:
* games not detecting the mouse
* game speed being wrong or X/Y axis having different speeds
* weird jittery movement in some games
* weird acceleration in some games
* some games straight out go bonkers where the mouse flies to the edge of the screen (Delphine games mostly - Cruise for a Corpse, Stealth Affair, etc.)
* games straight up crashing on start
If you have a specific game that demands a certain amount of conventional memory and doesn't conflict, it's a good option, otherwise, just use the Microsoft mouse driver for best compatibility
- VIDECDD works well in 95% of all cases but for some games, it causes crashes or for the game to not recognize the CD drive as a CD drive and in the case of a few games it causes weird behaviour.
Here's a good example: Little Big Adventure would not run properly on any of the tested PCs which all had various hardware - I even made a topic about it a while back asking for help here. It turns out VIDECDD was the culprit: when copying the speech files to the hard drive, it would corrupt them and then cause the game to crash. I moved to the original driver of the CD drives and on every system, this fixed the issue.
- Do NOT use a non-standard MSCDEX. This causes massive issues in tons of games - CD audio not playing or skipping or repeating, stuttering, games crashing, etc.
While all these low-memory options are great, there's not a single one that has perfect compatibility. If you only want to play a certain few games that are well known you're unlikely to run into many issues since the typical ones like DOOM, Lemmings, etc. all work fine but there's quite a few that can give you a major headache so if you're a proper DOS gamer, steer clear.
Also, it's perfectly possible to have 600kb+ conventional free if you know what you're doing with your config.sys and autoexec.bat without using these low memory options.
Retro game fanatic.
IBM PS1 386SX25 - 4MB
IBM Aptiva 486SX33 - 8MB - 2GB CF - SB16
IBM PC350 P233MMX - 64MB - 32GB SSD - AWE64 - Voodoo2
PIII600 - 320MB - 480GB SSD - SB Live! - GF4 Ti 4200
i5-2500k - 3GB - SB Audigy 2 - HD 4870