mothergoose729 wrote on 2025-01-27, 05:59:

Which has me curious... what are these games that run in a pure DOS environment, but ONLY if certain windows components are also available?

There are no such games. A game running in pure DOS does not care whether or not you have a Windows installation.
More likely they just didn't like whatever hardware you were emulating in 86box.

feda wrote on 2025-01-27, 06:52:

mothergoose729 wrote on 2025-01-27, 05:59:

Which has me curious... what are these games that run in a pure DOS environment, but ONLY if certain windows components are also available?

There are no such games. A game running in pure DOS does not care whether or not you have a Windows installation.
More likely they just didn't like whatever hardware you were emulating in 86box.

If I swap the virtual hard drives between the two machines I get the same behavior. The Pentium won't boot NFSSE in dos 6.22 but it will on the wind0ws95 image and vice versa with the PII machine. The autoexec and config.sys files are identical. The only difference is one is FAT32 with windows 95 and the other is FAT 16 with DOS 6.22.

I’ve had games throw a hissy fit when emulators runs in windowed mode you sort of get the effect of a windowed games running in a windowed emulator.

I can tell you that NFSSE and Tie Fighter CD work perfectly fine in Dosbox. Windows is irrelevant.

feda wrote on 2025-01-27, 07:18:

I can tell you that NFSSE and Tie Fighter CD work perfectly fine in Dosbox. Windows is irrelevant.

Yeah it works in Dosbox. I'm not taking it for granted that Dosbox environment is identical to DOS 6.22.

I'm happy to be wrong, but I need a good reason to be wrong.

There are DOS games like MDK or Ignition that have updates for 3D graphics cards (3DFX) which require Windows 95.

Also there are DOS games like Zoop that after copying the game files the installer runs Windows 3.1 to create the icons. According to the manual, the game requires Windows 3.1 to run (which it's not true).

The installer for Tyrian 2000 is Windows 95 only but the game is DOS only.

I have TIE Fighter CD and it runs fine in MS-DOS 6.22, both on my P133 and PIII 800. There must be another reason why it doesn't run in your case. Do you get any error message or simply a black screen when starting it?

Star Havoc is the only game that I know so far that sort of requires Windows 9x, the executable is a DOS application where LFN support is mandatory.

I can't remember a specific game this applies to, but the TACTCOM patch for EF2000 requires Windows to be installed even though the game is DOS.

Extreme Paintbrawl. The game is absolutely so bad it's good imo, the menus run in Windows but the game engine itself (Build) is DOS based.

Didn't Bethesda's Redguard have a Windows installer, while the actual game ran in DOS?

It's been a long time since I played this, so I could be wrong.

Using 86box, I tested Need for Speed SE and Star Wars Tie Fighter CD on DOS 6.22. The former doesn't work with EMM386 but does work without it. The latter works with both.

ntalaec wrote on 2025-01-27, 08:29:

There are DOS games like MDK or Ignition that have updates for 3D graphics cards (3DFX) which require Windows 95.

MDK and Ignition are hybrid DOS/Windows releases. They come with both executables on the CD.

eddman wrote on 2025-01-27, 13:20:

Using 86box, I tested Need for Speed SE and Star Wars Tie Fighter CD on DOS 6.22. The former doesn't work with EMM386 but does work without it. The latter works with both.

ntalaec wrote on 2025-01-27, 08:29:

There are DOS games like MDK or Ignition that have updates for 3D graphics cards (3DFX) which require Windows 95.

MDK and Ignition are hybrid DOS/Windows games. They come with both executables on the CD.

Interesting, maybe it has something to do with memory management.

Gmlb256 wrote on 2025-01-27, 12:27:

Star Havoc is the only game that I know so far that sort of requires Windows 9x, the executable is a DOS application where LFN support is mandatory.

Interesting. I wonder if that game would work in pure DOS when DOSLFN is loaded.

I guess it depends on how the game's detection routine works. Does it just check if LFN is working simply by accessing a file by its long file name?

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-01-27, 13:13:

Didn't Bethesda's Redguard have a Windows installer, while the actual game ran in DOS?

Oh, I think quite a few games had that. It was common practice when it was assumed the average user had Windows, so there was an option to provide more "intuitive" installers, while taking advantage of Windows' ability to run DOS programs to avoid recompiling the entire game as a Win32 executable. Some example off the top of my head include Rayman Designer/Gold/Forever.

eddman wrote on 2025-01-27, 13:20:

Using 86box, I tested Need for Speed SE and Star Wars Tie Fighter CD on DOS 6.22. The former doesn't work with EMM386 but does work without it.

This may depend on the particular hardware (whether real or emulated) or on the EMM386 configuration. The DOS version of NFS:SE never had problems running with EMM386 (including EMS emulation) on my K6-2 machine.

digger wrote on 2025-01-27, 16:22:

Gmlb256 wrote on 2025-01-27, 12:27:

Star Havoc is the only game that I know so far that sort of requires Windows 9x, the executable is a DOS application where LFN support is mandatory.

Interesting. I wonder if that game would work in pure DOS when DOSLFN is loaded.

It does work with DOSLFN (tested on MS-DOS 7.1), a DPMI server is also required as well.

I guess it depends on how the game's detection routine works. Does it just check if LFN is working simply by accessing a file by its long file name?

Yes, the game does access the files by its long file name. Without LFN support, it will report errors with such files and the initialization would fail.

I also tested System Shock Enhanced, with both the classic and enhanced exes, and it works fine with and without EMM386.

dr_st wrote on 2025-01-27, 16:33:

This may depend on the particular hardware (whether real or emulated) or on the EMM386 configuration. The DOS version of NFS:SE never had problems running with EMM386 (including EMS emulation) on my K6-2 machine.

Yea, I tried again after a restart and it now works with EMM386. It is a very temperamental game, and with the windows exe too.

If a game requires Windows, it will be mentioned on the box. A DOS game is what it is - a game that is played in DOS.

If the patch requires Windows, it will be mentioned in the readme file accompanying the patch.

An executable that requires Windows will display the message when running such executable in DOS - "This program requires Windows" or "This program cannot be run in DOS mode" and such.

If the DOS program doesn't run without error messages or hangs at the prompt after entering the executable, then it means there are other problems going on like memory problems - not enough conventional memory, existence or absence of expanded memory,etc., or sound driver problems, incorrect IRQ or address of the sound card, etc.

I'm only familiar with Need for Speed SE which installed ok on my Dos 6.22 / Win3x 486.
I can't remember if I had to manually run a different exe file. eg setup_d.exe, I know I had to do that for one of these cross over games that pure install.exe wasn't happy in dos.