VOGONS


First post, by stet

User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie

Could someone point me to a guide on how to get Master of Magic to run on a MSDOS 6 PC (i.e. not in DOSBox)?

With a stripped down config, and mem reporting 583K of free conventional memory, I'm still getting the dreaded "Insufficient memory. You need at least 581K free. Try removing all TSR's." (That appears after the intro sequence which plays fine with sound, etc.)

Is there a way to copy all the game files to the HD so I don't need to load the cdrom driver at all? That's about the only way I see to increase free conventional memory at this point.

Or maybe it's not an issue with conventional memory? Does it run on a 686 cpu under MSDOS 6? Or is some patch/update needed (this is version 1.2)?

Thanks.

Reply 1 of 4, by dionb

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++

I still regularly play MoM, both in DOSBox and on bare metal, and have never really had problems like you describe. The game certainly will run from HDD only - in fact I lost my CD years ago and just copy the files from HDD to HDD.

I'm pretty sure 686 isn't the problem, I've played it on a P3 not too long ago.

583k doesn't sound like a lot though.
- are you using DOS=HIGH,UMB?
- is EMM386.EXE running?
- are you loading all drivers with DEVICEHIGH (in config.sys) or LH (in autoexec.bat)?

Reply 2 of 4, by stet

User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie

Turns out the problem was I had forgotten the "RAM" parameter to EMM386.EXE.
I had:
DEVICE=EMM386.EXE 4096
which gave me 4mb of expanded memory but no upper memory (UMBs).
Changing that line to:
DEVICE=EMM386.EXE 4096 RAM
enabled upper memory which allowed drivers to be loaded high and freed up plenty of conventional memory for the game.

I'd still like to be able to run from just the HD. I tried copying all the files from the CD, but I must not have them arranged correctly, because it still asks for the CD when I try to run the game. How do you have the files/directories arranged so that it doesn't look for the CD?

Reply 3 of 4, by malicious

User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie

With my MoM 1.2 CD, I manually copy the 'game' sub-directory to my hard disk and run install.exe from the destination directory to configure sound. The game should run without the CD then.

Reply 4 of 4, by stet

User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie

Thanks, that did the trick.

And just to clarify for any future readers of this thread, you only need to copy the contents of the game directory on the CD. You don't need any of the files at the top level of the CD. Once you've copied the files from the game directory to a directory on your hard drive, switch to that directory and run install .exe.