Maybe it has hardcoded protection from running on C: or maybe also D: drive.

What drive letter did your Ramdrive use?

J

Its a good point, but why does it cause the games that hardcoded to run off a floppy to work too? Maybe the logic breaks given a high drive letter for everything...

It's probably related to "protection" ... just how old is it? perhaps PCs with lots of drives were not at all common at the time it was released, so they didn't test for that?

It's should be fairly easy to test exactly what it wants/accepts.

Using a virtual machine like PCEM, 86BOX etc. you can set up whatever drives you want (even floppies) using image files, then boot up DOS and try running the game from the various places - nothing else on the virtual system would change other than the location from where you are running the game,

I would guess that the search paths for the game files and the copy protection are two separate systems, which means the fact that it checks the floppy doesn't necessarily mean it's doing it for copy protection purposes

A little more info as I am still intrigued by this even if no one else is:

When I run 'Tycoon: The Commodity Market Simulator' I get the following message upon failure:

ERROR CM AT IP FFFDH

But copy the same exact directory to the RAMDRIVE and run it and it works. I also tried copying it to drive 'I' and it doesn't work there either. So I tried another Game "Rush'n Attack" by Konami. From the HDD I get a message that says

"Insert Disk 1 and press a key."

but again, copy it to the ramdrive at it works fine. Note I tried this game on the 'I' drive too and it still fails with the same message. So it doesn't seem to be a drive letter thing.

EDIT: I think this is an available space issue. Too large an HDD for some routine on these games...When I move them to my smaller C drive they work. My original analysis was flawed. I'll post if I find anything else interesting with this though.

Shagittarius wrote on 2026-02-11, 00:40:

EDIT: I think this is an available space issue. Too large an HDD for some routine on these games...When I move them to my smaller C drive they work. My original analysis was flawed. I'll post if I find anything else interesting with this though.

The other variable is that many games fail when the available memory is too high, creating a ramdrive could eat up enough memory to fix that issue. There's numerous ways an early PC game can fail on newer systems.

Might be the removable drive flag

I have had the converse, tried to install to large ramdrive and got told it had to be a non-removeable drive.

My original version of Starflight (1986?) won’t run on hard drive partitions that are too big. I had to make a 200mb partition to play it on my socket 7 pc. Something about the game didn’t like the big hdd (or maybe it was a FAT12 vs FAT16 thing?)

Your ramdrive is likely not too big in size. But depending on your hard drive, it might simply be too big or too new a filesystem (e.g. later than FAT12). Especially if the file i/o is custom code in the game.