Recently picked up a game called Ski or Die on 5.25 floppy disks. I have a 5.25 floppy drive in my Windows 98 PC (1.2mb I think) and I can read them in Windows just fine. But in pure DOS mode this game won't run.
Are these supposed to work in pure DOS, or do I need to install MS DOS on its own?
Write-protected, hopefully. Windows 9x is a floppy disk killer.
https://www.os2museum.com/wp/the-ihc-damage/
Also, how did you start the games? I mean, what exactly causes trouble? 🤷♂️
Edit: Found this info: no copy protection, hard disk supported.
https://www.mobygames.com/game/496/ski-or-die … 4569/cover-816/
"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel
//My video channel//
This is a 1990 game that ran on XTs and CGA/EGA, very far from the Windows 98 era in computers time. A lot of old DOS games won't run and lot of things can go wrong: the PC is too fast, with too much memory or too large HDD, the VGA is too new...
You don't give much information about the PC you are using, but as a general advice you can try booting an older DOS version from a floppy (no need to install anything) and slowing down the computer by, for example, disabling caches in BIOS (depends on the CPU).
Actually, the drive doesn’t read any of my disks in Windows now. Just makes a loud rattling a sound that kinda sounds like it’s tearing it in half. Think the drive is broke
Actually got it to run in pure DOS mode. But after the title screen I just get a small picture of a dude snowboarding and the text “please describe moves below”. I can only enter two letters, and no matter what I enter, it’s wrong. After a bunch of tries, it just throws me back to DOS.
This is a weird game. I thought you’d, you know, ski.
That might be screen resolution - often a problem in Windows DOS
-- edit - I was referring to the "small picture" - but if it's trying to "protect itself"
-- as described in my next message, this is probably perfectly normal!
Have you tried it in DosBox - often much better... but you might need a XP+ system for DosBox.
(anyone know if it will run in 98)?
You might also want to grab DBDOS from my site - it's intended to help boot real DOS under
DosBox, but in this case - you could use the included XDISK tool to read your floppy disk into
an image - which you could mount in DosBox (and it never hurts to have a backup of the data)
You *might* be able to read the files from the floppy disk into a folder on your system and
mount that under DosBox - depends on how much "media checking" it does (and if it's
really aggressive about that - it might not even run in DosBox)
Dave ::: https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ::: "Daves Old Computers"->Personal
Dave ::: https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ::: "Daves Old Computers"->Personal
JustRob wrote on 2025-03-05, 14:14:Actually got it to run in pure DOS mode. But after the title screen I just get a small picture of a dude snowboarding and the text “please describe moves below”. I can only enter two letters, and no matter what I enter, it’s wrong. After a bunch of tries, it just throws me back to DOS.
This might be some sort of "copy protection" - perhaps the picture changes (based on day, month, who knows)
and you have to enter a two character code shown in the manual - I don't know for sure, I've never
seen this game - but I have seen things that protected themselves this way!
Dave ::: https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ::: "Daves Old Computers"->Personal
Dave ::: https://dunfield.themindfactory.com ::: "Daves Old Computers"->Personal
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