Thanks for the suggestions, zsknight22 and alexanrs. I will test them tomorrow.
zsknight22 wrote:My current Pentium-120mhz system is running DOS 6.22/WFW 3.11 with 16MB of memory.
Currently I won't be downgrading the main retro PC since I don't have all the components for a Super Socket 7 build with ISA slots.
zsknight22 wrote:I generally find that building a system with no more than 32-64MB of memory tends to bring the best results. [...] So yes, in your case I would definitely try downgrading your system memory and see if that helps, after properly re-optimizing your startup files and memory usage of course.
The reason for more memory than 16MB/64MB is because I want to eventually get Win9x gaming on it as well. I can remove the 256MB DIMMS for some operations, but I'd prefer to avoid fiddling too much with the hardware on a regular basis.
zsknight22 wrote:
Unfortunately I don't possess a 16MB DIMM.
zsknight22 wrote:After optimizing my autoexec.bat/config.sys I get very few complaints from DOS game installation algorithms, if any.
I'm using Phil's autoexec.bat and config.sys plus what was added by the AWE64 drivers and utilities.
alexanrs wrote:Also, you can try to start the installer in Windows 3.11 from a custom PIF file that configures the app to start with more than 2MB (the default) XMS/EMS memory. [...] Since you have plenty of memory, you could also edit the _DEFAULT.PIF file and increase the default amount of memory given to all DOS boxes
The PIF file customizations I wasn't aware of until this moment, thanks. I am not very familiar yet with Windows pre-95.
alexanrs wrote:You could try limiting your available memory... If you are using HIMEM.SYS you could try the /NOABOVE16 parameter and see if it restricts you to 16MB.
(EDIT) Great idea, I also wasn't aware of this option.
zsknight22 wrote:the memory requirements of old dos games
(EDIT) What is nagging me is that DD2 is a 1996 game, one of the more recent big title releases for DOS. I was expecting this sort of thing from older DOS games, not from this one.
In the worst case scenario, I could just install it to a DOS VM with 16MB and copy the installed directory to the real machine, but I really want to understand the issue and explore the options for anyone else bumping into this issue in the future.