It shouldn't. I've ran it on 16MB on Win95's DOS 7 before. A lot of people in 96-97 would be in trouble if they couldn't....

The only time Quake needs double the ram requirement is for 16MB to be able to run it under Windows 95 (otherwise 8mb machines could only play it under DOS)

Officially, Quake for DOS requires 8MB of RAM when running under actual DOS (not a Windows DOS box) . DOS 6.22 or 7.1 (Windows 98) does not change anything in that respect .

Reference : https://web.archive.org/web/19970108204611/ht … idsoftware.com/
EDIT : More specifically --> https://web.archive.org/web/19961220085517/ht … om/dlquake.html

Even the the DOS version executable bundled with the latest GOG release still runs with 8MB of RAM (I tested it in a Virtualbox VM, because I don't have any physical machines with 8MB of RAM) and it runs fine under DOS 7.1 (aka the DOs version bundled with Windows 98 ) :

Click on the GIF file if you want to see it play .

My NEC Ready 7022 Pentium PC running at 100mhz had 8mb of RAM originally, and I played a bit of Quake on it like that. It was playable, but I specifically remember in the middle of E1M2 that it would chug hardcore for a bit accessing the hard drive like crazy and then go back to normal. When I upgraded the RAM to 40mb, that no longer happened.

Ok so it could be something especific to this PC? Its a Pentium-S 100 with a intel triton chispet motherboard , s3 trio64 and sb16. I'm trying to run philcomputer quake benchmark and it refuses to, unless I add a couple ram modules.

After booting, go straight to DOS. Press F8 and select Command Prompt only. It should run fine with 8MB of memory.

Its ms-dos 7.1 standalone version 😐 so I can have a 20GB partition.

So where seems to be the problem? Just run DOS without any system/util programms - SHIFT+F5 will do the same. There could be running smartdrv and using many MB of extended memory. So skip all to have all memory available.

Check used memory with:

mem/c/p

FiIosofia wrote on 2021-08-08, 22:41:

Why does quake run on ms-dos 6.22 with 16MB of ram but needs 32MB on ms-dos 7.1 ?

What gave you that impression?

FiIosofia wrote on 2021-08-09, 09:15:

Its ms-dos 7.1 standalone version 😐 so I can have a 20GB partition.

MS-DOS 7.1 was never really standalone to begin with, legally it only comes with Windows 95 OSR2 and Windows 98 installations.

However Quake runs fine on it in MS-DOS mode without any issues though.

I copied some files from my legit win98 cd-rom into a floppy disk and followed some intructions (maybe on phil's ?) maybe my ms-dos frankestein is incomplete

Could you please share your autoexec.bat and config.sys files and the file generated by running

mem /c > mem.txt

FiIosofia wrote on 2021-08-09, 15:44:

I copied some files from my legit win98 cd-rom into a floppy disk and followed some intructions (maybe on phil's ?) maybe my ms-dos frankestein is incomplete

Then it is fine as I have done this before back then. Some executables that comes from a real MS-DOS installation such as HELP, GRAPHICS, JOIN and DOSSHELL are missing though.

You can get some of these files from TOOLS/OLDMSDOS directory from the Windows 98 CD in case you didn't know.

FiIosofia wrote on 2021-08-09, 15:44:

I copied some files from my legit win98 cd-rom into a floppy disk and followed some intructions (maybe on phil's ?) maybe my ms-dos frankestein is incomplete

If it boots it's OK by minimum standards and Quake by itself doesn't need anything else from DOS.