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Unable to find certain files under DOS

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First post, by Munx

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So here is the story.

Some games, namely Doom, Duke3D and Quake run ok on a 5x85 build of mine when running in Windows. However when I restart into DOS mode, certain files become invisible and I am unable to launch these games.
First I though this was a bad CF card, so I switched to a new one. That didn't work, so I assumed the controller just didn't like CF cards, so I switched to a real hard drive, but I'm still getting the same problem. They are all formatted with a w98 startup disk into FAT16.

I forget which file Doom cannot find, but Quake gets an error "W_LoadWadFile: couldn't load GFX.wad", Duke 3D is "Could not find group file 'DUKE3D.GRP' ". Duk3ed will also start up just fine after installing the game, but will not find Duke3d.grp after a restart.
I had a similar issue quite a while ago with another 486 PC too, but I put that project to the side.

Can anyone advise me on what I'm doing wrong here? Maybe I did not set up the hard drive correctly?

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Reply 2 of 3, by Oetker

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It looks like you're running the games from c:\windows, are you?
You should change to the games' directory first and run them from there. They're probably looking in the currently active directory (as opposed to the directory of their .exe file) for their resources.

Reply 3 of 3, by Munx

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Oetker wrote on 2020-06-08, 11:37:

It looks like you're running the games from c:\windows, are you?
You should change to the games' directory first and run them from there. They're probably looking in the currently active directory (as opposed to the directory of their .exe file) for their resources.

derSammler wrote on 2020-06-08, 11:37:

Try adding FILES=40 to config.sys

I'll try that, thanks

EDIT: OK, so changing to the games directory before launching it worked. Thanks a lot!

My builds!
The FireStarter 2.0 - The wooden K5
The Underdog - The budget K6
The Voodoo powerhouse - The power-hungry K7
The troll PC - The Socket 423 Pentium 4

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