For the dosbox approach you should give us the mountings you tried, or even better read and follow the 60 seconds guide in the dosbox part of this forum.

I created an installation directory (C:\ULFOOTBALL) and mounted it as C. Then I mounted my CD drive as D. I can run the install program off the disk, but it claims to not detect the CD drive at all.

Use the label option

Ok, so how does that work? I typed HELP /ALL and couldn't find it in the list of DOSBox commands.

BTW, I heard the very good suggestion that I use my Windows 95 laptop with CONFIG.SYS disabled, since Windows doesn't need DOS drivers to run and not loading them may free memory up. I likely will still need to create a skeleton one with HIMEM and EMM386 so the game can use EMS memory though.

read the dosbox readme.

[Thread moved to DOSBox Games/Apps. Section]

Ok, I did the MSCDEX trick and got DOSBox to recognize the CD, but now I have a new problem. I run the game's install program and get the following message:

THIS GAME REQUIRES 100000 BYTES OF FREE DISK SPACE. YOU HAVE 0 BYTES.

BTW, you also mentioned using the LABEL option with the CD. Turns out the game disk has no volume ID. Weird.

I did the MSCDEX trick

Adding "-t cdrom" to your mount line? More like correct procedure than a trick.

THIS GAME REQUIRES 100000 BYTES OF FREE DISK SPACE. YOU HAVE 0 BYTES.

There's a workaround in this thread: "...needs 0 bytes", so won't install? (Machiavelli The Prince)

Ok, so the installer is trying to use some unsupported DOS function calls. I will have to try the program included in the thread.

The game installed successfully, but I'm still getting a "Cannot find the CD!" message.

As I mentioned earlier, I suspect that this is because of the game CD having no volume label.

Is there a workaround for this?

There is a patch on the Patches Scrolls site for Ultimate Football '95 that says it is a "CD not found" fix. Sounds like it's worth trying. 😀

There also appears to be an update for the digital sound drivers.

Ok, I did all that and got the game to run. However, the sound is not working correctly for some reason. I can faintly hear the game music and SFX under this continuous loud noise that sounds like a diesel engine running (I did download the driver update mentioned in here).

Is this a problem with the game or is there some DOSBox setting I have to adjust?

You're right, that is indeed an annoying sound, and appears to be an issue related to EMS that I'll report to the DOSBox devs in more detail. It looks like SB is the only supported digital sound option, and disabling it in the install is the easy (but unsatisfying) solution. There is a solution that will require a bit more effort, but maybe the game is worth it for you.

The workaround is to provide EMS memory to the game using the JEMM memory manager available here. It is possible to use JEMM386.EXE with XMS provided by DOSBox, but I think it will work best to have all memory management done by JEMM, so use JEMMEX.EXE from the binary archive. Set the DOSBox config to ems=false, xms=false, umb=false, and then run JEMM like this: JEMMEX FRAME=E000 LOAD (ignore the pageframe warning). The SB sound should be OK with this.

Ok, that fixed it. It also solved another question I had forgotten to ask about, which was that the animation became incredibly slow and choppy when I got into action mode.

Geez, what an annoying, high-maintenance game to set up. I would have liked to run it on my Windows 95 laptop except that it's seemingly impossible to free enough conventional memory. Then again, this was the first time I'd ever tried to run anything above 16-bit real mode games on DOSBox, and I guess I wasn't prepared for the much greater demands of 32-bit stuff.

BTW, I think this is a real-mode game that only uses EMS ala Day of the Tentacle and Colonization. I certainly don't see any message about DOS4GW when I start it up.

Yes, it runs in real mode and uses plain EMS function calls, but it may be relying on DMA handling found only in EMM386 and similar memory managers. At any rate, it's good that all your effort to get the game running finally paid off. 😀

i have installed the game but can't play it in action mode. keep getting error #131 uniforms sprite25.hom. What does this mean and how can I fix this?