First post, by paradigital
- Rank
- Oldbie
So I've recently picked up an Olivetti PCS 33 machine (386SX-25) and the first thing I wanted to try was Commander Keen, specifically Keen4 as this was my favorite episode back in the day.
The PC itself appears to be ok, stable, everything seems to work just fine. It's booting into what looks to be an Olivetti branded version of MS-DOS 5.00 from the internal Conner 40MB HDD, and the little testing I've done suggests that it's stable when running the few bits of software that were present on the HDD (wordstar, qbasic/nibbles/gorillas). I've even had my Iomega ZIP100 disk connected up to transfer files onto the system.
So onto Keen4. I've copied this over onto the HDD, but when launching keen4e.exe it gets no further than the launch screen. In the lower right quadrant of the screen where it shows "Memory Available to Game" I see xxxxx Kbytes for everything (Standard, Expanded, Extended, Total). I'm assuming this is an issue with memory management? It's been that long since I played with DOS that I've forgotten all about the quirks of extended memory managers.
The BIOS shows I have 640k base, 384k expanded and 3072k extended memory (which I find odd as the board has 1MB built in and 4MB in 2x30pin SIMMS).
I think there's an EMM being loaded in config.sys in the form of EMMBOX3.SYS being loaded, no idea if this is messing me up or not!
Any help appreciated.
Edited to add: I've REM'd EMMBOX3.sys and now the game sees 339Kbytes total. So I definitely need to do something with my memory management!
