I got frogerjr working! I did some more googling and I found that this issue can pop up in fortran applications when the number of files in the root directory is above a certain number.
https://in.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answer … ting-code-which
Windows adds a bunch of junk to the root of the C drive and I probably can't delete any of it. So what I did is create another partition 8mb in size, move my files on to that partition, and then ran it from there. And success!
These games I am trying to run have had their copy protection stripped from a booter floppy, so it makes some sense why they might promote themselves to the root of the drive when running. I think when I ran DOS 6.22 I just had fewer files at the root directory before.
I am going to try the six or seven other games I had already given up on and see if that fixes them 😁