Related to this…

What was the first DOS game that required a hard drive?

From memory many early games had random copy protection schemes and explicitly lacked HD installations. This didn’t stop the questionair upon launching a game asking about your system configuration but we need to remember that the first dos versions didn’t even have directory support so before Kings Quest it was unlikely you had a good clean way to install to an industry standard hd.

I have faint memory of some that had you make a "play disk" from the original disks. So you could also save games, and have the level/assets of the part you were playing on one disk. Was one of the Test Drive's like that? Not sure, may have come after HDD installable ones but when there were still HDDless machines around.

Edit: oh yeah you had some real fun and games depending on DOS version and system config, with those early installers. Some insisted on installing on Drive C only, which was a problem when you maybe did an 8/32 split of your 40mb instead of 32/8 for Fat12 limits. Did game companies learn from this? Not at all, some early CD games would only install when CD was drive E.

BitWrangler wrote on 2025-01-08, 19:20:

I have faint memory of some that had you make a "play disk" from the original disks. So you could also save games, and have the level/assets of the part you were playing on one disk. Was one of the Test Drive's like that? Not sure, may have come after HDD installable ones but when there were still HDDless machines around.

You're probably thinking of Test Drive II, one of the most convoluted HDD installations ever... the "installer" is actually a batch file that only displays a text with instructions on what to do, including manually creating a directory and then running the game from that directory, which has a built-in installation utility where you create a "Play Disk", copy the cars, tracks and all that stuff. I assume this absurd process may be related to the copy protection scheme, otherwise there is no reason why the developers wouldn't have written a small routine that just copies the files from the floppies to the HDD.

BitWrangler wrote on 2025-01-08, 19:20:

Edit: oh yeah you had some real fun and games depending on DOS version and system config, with those early installers. Some insisted on installing on Drive C only, which was a problem when you maybe did an 8/32 split of your 40mb instead of 32/8 for Fat12 limits. Did game companies learn from this? Not at all, some early CD games would only install when CD was drive E.

Yeah, this was really annoying... I hated those CD games that wrote config files wherever they feel like it, come on, is it that difficult to code your game so that it doesn't use hard-coded filenames?

That's a good question... I can't recall the first game I ever played that had an "install to HDD" option, or that required you to install it to play it. I do however remember the first game that I ever played with the "coolest" installer I had ever seen up to that point.

Command & Conquer! 😀