SimCity 2000's installation program has issues with RAM detection if too much RAM is installed. It will claim you have too little RAM, but the game will still work fine.

Dune II has audio problems with more than 16 MiB RAM installed.

Destruction Derby 2 (DOS version) also fails to install if too much memory. (Windows version is OK.)

Pirates! Gold doesn't run properly with more than 16 MB RAM, and that one is notoriously nearly impossible to counter it with RAMdisk drivers unlike any other DOS games with this problem.

And the ramdisk can solve 99% of the issue?

Yes. The best one is XMSDSK which is removable when no longer needed.

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-05-20, 15:43:

SimCity 2000's installation program has issues with RAM detection if too much RAM is installed. It will claim you have too little RAM, but the game will still work fine.

How much is to much for simcity 2000?

Aladdin has problems with more than 32MB RAM.

Robin4 wrote on 2024-05-20, 17:01:

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-05-20, 15:43:

SimCity 2000's installation program has issues with RAM detection if too much RAM is installed. It will claim you have too little RAM, but the game will still work fine.

How much is to much for simcity 2000?

I think it might be over 16 MB that triggers the warning. It apparently triggers with 32 MB of RAM or more.

Again, the game itself will run just fine. I've run it on a system with 2GB of RAM.

It's just the installer that pops up a warning.

Pretty sure Death Rally won't install if there's more than 64MB RAM installed.

They released an official patch to fix it.

I believe DOS doesn't see more than 64 MiB anyway.

Dune II SETUP freezes or crashes (depending on how much RAM is installed). The game itself runs fine.
Pinball Fantasies crashes on startup. SETSOUND.EXE of Pinball Fantasies crashes with a Page Fault. The game itself runs fine.

In both cases limiting the RAM to 12 MB using a tool like XMSDSK helps. Tested on a PIII 800 machine with 128 MB RAM.

Kalle wrote on 2024-05-20, 18:18:

Pinball Fantasies crashes on startup.

Strange, I've never encountered such problems.
And it seems to only use conventional memory, refusing to run if too many drivers/TSRs are loaded.
Why would it even care about extended memory?

Gmlb256 wrote on 2024-05-20, 16:01:

Pirates! Gold doesn't run properly with more than 16 MB RAM, and that one is notoriously nearly impossible to counter it with RAMdisk drivers unlike any other DOS games with this problem.

Heh? I played Pirates Gold recently on my P233MMX with 28MB of RAM (it's 32MB but integrated VGA takes 4MB). I finished the game without trouble.

wbahnassi wrote on 2024-05-21, 02:58:

Gmlb256 wrote on 2024-05-20, 16:01:

Pirates! Gold doesn't run properly with more than 16 MB RAM, and that one is notoriously nearly impossible to counter it with RAMdisk drivers unlike any other DOS games with this problem.

Heh? I played Pirates Gold recently on my P233MMX with 28MB of RAM (it's 32MB but integrated VGA takes 4MB). I finished the game without trouble.

Interesting, I was unable to play it with 64 MB+ RAM and I initially used an old version of HIMEM.SYS to get around this. It led me thinking that the game had problems with more than 16 MB as a result. 😜

For games that are having problems because of too much RAM installed i use memeater.

https://github.com/kklis/memeater

No problems so far on ALi Aladdin V chipset (Asus P5A).
Games that are not working before work after stealing some RAM with memeater.

Grzyb wrote on 2024-05-20, 19:56:

Strange, I've never encountered such problems. And it seems to only use conventional memory, refusing to run if too many drivers […]
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Kalle wrote on 2024-05-20, 18:18:

Pinball Fantasies crashes on startup.

Strange, I've never encountered such problems.
And it seems to only use conventional memory, refusing to run if too many drivers/TSRs are loaded.
Why would it even care about extended memory?

There are different versions of Pinball Fantasies. Most notably, GOG sells "Pinball Fantasies Deluxe". IIRC something in Pinball Fantasies Deluxe uses a DOS externder that crashes if too much memory (EMS or XMS) is available, whereas classic Pinball Fantasies is a plain real mode application.

mkarcher wrote on 2024-05-21, 18:18:

There are different versions of Pinball Fantasies. Most notably, GOG sells "Pinball Fantasies Deluxe". IIRC something in Pinball Fantasies Deluxe uses a DOS externder that crashes if too much memory (EMS or XMS) is available, whereas classic Pinball Fantasies is a plain real mode application.

Thanks, it explains everything.
Yes, DOS extenders solved the 640 KB problem, but sometimes introduced new issues.
I really regret there was no such thing as "32-bit DOS" - a simple, lightweight OS, with 32-bit API built in.

Grzyb wrote on 2024-05-21, 19:42:

Thanks, it explains everything. Yes, DOS extenders solved the 640 KB problem, but sometimes introduced new issues. I really regr […]
Show full quote

mkarcher wrote on 2024-05-21, 18:18:

There are different versions of Pinball Fantasies. Most notably, GOG sells "Pinball Fantasies Deluxe". IIRC something in Pinball Fantasies Deluxe uses a DOS externder that crashes if too much memory (EMS or XMS) is available, whereas classic Pinball Fantasies is a plain real mode application.

Thanks, it explains everything.
Yes, DOS extenders solved the 640 KB problem, but sometimes introduced new issues.
I really regret there was no such thing as "32-bit DOS" - a simple, lightweight OS, with 32-bit API built in.

There were DOS compatible, i386-based multi-user operating systems like real/32 or PC-MOS/386.

They weren't using much 32-Bit code yet, but that wasn't needed at the time.
Using 16-Bit code was more efficient, sometimes, which OS/2 1.x did demonstrate.
16-Bit code/data was often smaller and resulted in a better cache use, as well.

The problem with DOS was that it had been wished dead since the late 1980s.
OS/2 and other OSes were meant to get rid of DOS.

It wasn't until the 90s when PCs got more mainstream that DOS had sort of a revival, also because of DR-DOS 5/MS-DOS 5 and MCGA/VGA games.

That's when ordinary users had started to work with large amounts of memory and storage first time.
Memory managers and HDD doublers had sold well in that time.

It was also the time when Amiga users and the demoscene hit the PC platform.
32-Bit flat memory addressing was all the rage in early/mid 90s.

32-Bit DOS Extenders and standards such as DPMI were providing programmers a solution to high-performance applications.

On Windows side, the many 32-Bit extenders were being used in the Windows 3 times, as well.
Like Win386 extender by Watcom, which provided a 32-Bit API version of Win16.
Sierra Online used it in the Windows games such as Kings Quest 7, I believe.

That was about the point when a real 32-Bit MS-DOS nolonger made sense.
I'd imagine it would have caused nothing but trouble, while being less powerful than simply using a 32-Bit extender.

OS/2 aside, the closest that comes to mind in a modern DOS experience would be running DesqView/X, maybe.

It can multitask DOS applications, while offering compatibility to ported X11 applications.

Oh, and then there was something else that happened. Linux hit the scene in the mid-late 90s.
Coding for baremetal became somewhat "unsexy" at the time. 🙁
Which lead to statements such as "DOS is just a better bootloader".

Edit: There's sort of lightweight, modern OS. MenuetOS (32-Bit) and its fork, KolibriOS.
These two are largely being written in 32-Bit assembly language. There's even a DOSBox port available.

It's not exactly "DOS", though. DOS as such is heavily being tied to 16-Bit x86 registers, Real-Mode and the PC-BIOS.

Porting it to modern a modern ISA is tricky and perhaps being less successful than just re-implementing it.
As a 64-Bit OS, maybe, with a dependency on UEFI.
Keeping DOS ABI might be possible, even. Software-interrupts, I mean. An modern equivalent to int21h, maybe.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-05-21, 21:17:

There were DOS compatible, i386-based multi-user operating systems like real/32 or PC-MOS/386.
They weren't using much 32-Bit code yet, but that wasn't needed at the time.

32-bit was needed, and BADLY.
The best proof is that there was so many 32-bit extenders: DOS4GW, PMODE, GO32, EMX, Phar Lap...
Which of course caused problems sometimes - too many extender/hardware combinations to test and properly support them all.

And that's my point: if IBM and/or Microsoft released "32-bit DOS", it would have dominated the market as soon as 386+ machines got common, and everybody would have been forced to support it.
Majority of problems like "too much RAM" would have been easily resolved by upgrading the OS.