What if you add more ram and lessen the reserved for system amount of memory.

I'm no expert nor is this an advice. Just think me as confused as you are, and trying to pull out my hair... err.. trying to figure out what's wrong 😁 :

Could you please elaborate :

1.) What games you're having problems with?
2.) How those games "behave strangely sometimes" like?
3.) I assume you're talking about these bootup files in your Pentium 2 system?
4.) If using in your Pentium 2, what are it's specs? Total Installed RAM? Chipset?
5.) Are you using MS-DOS 6.xx or other DOS with multiple boot blocks support?

General Troubleshooting:

1. If using MS-DOS 6 or above (or it's equivalents), use multiple boot blocks in the config.sys to make your life easier to troubleshoot.

2. Or, create a basic boot disk with minimal drivers/setups and try those games.

3. Try not to mix UMBPCI and EMM386 within the same config.

4. Try running without both EMM386 and UMBPCI, then without UMBPCI, then without EMM386.

5. I'm out of ideas. 😁

I am not by that computer right now, but it is the version of DOS that comes with Windows 98. It has 128mb of RAM. It boots straight to DOS, I mostly use Windows for flash drive's and organizing files.

The game I am having trouble with is Terminal Velocity right now. When I run the setup program to choose the sound card it crashes, even though I choose the right card and settings. It does say something about increasing the stacks setting in config.sys but I don't know what to set it to. The other game was Shadow Warrior but I was able to fix that, it would crash when running at 800 x 600 but it works at 640 x 480.

Although I haven't tried Terminal Velocity, just chiming in about your stacks comment.

If you want to try stacks there are usually 2 commands used the most
In the config.sys set:
STACKS=0,0
or
STACKS=9,128

STACKS=0,0 is disabled while 9,128 will allow asynchronous interrupts, max could be 64,512 but might cause alot of trouble.

why lastdrive z ?
granted changing it wont save you much

Davros wrote:

why lastdrive z ?
granted changing it wont save you much

Can't remember 😕

I originally put this machine together quite a while ago. What is it set to normally?

I'm pretty sure lastdrive=z is the default setting for new installations of DOS. At least what I installed 6.22 recently that what I remember it being set to.
As Davros said it makes little difference anyway.

The default is actually whatever DOS determines to be your last drive letter + 1, believe it or not. DOS determines this while loading config.sys so unless something needs a drive letter after that, lastdrive is unneeded.

http://www.vfrazee.com/ms-dos/6.22/help/lastdrive.htm
http://www.easydos.com/lastdrive.html

A lot of those DOS tweaks to things like buffers, stacks, fcbs, lastdrive, shell, etc are unnecessary and pointless unless you are fighting for every last bit of conventional memory. Usually this was people who had a lot of extra drivers and TSRs for their various bits of annoying SCSI or Creative AWE hardware. 😉

Occasionally a Windows 3 or DOS app would request a certain FILES or STACKS setting though....

If there is no LASTDRIVE= statement in the config.sys file, and if there are multiple partitions, like my system where the cd drive letters reach H: and I: level, usually the cd drive loaders like mscdex won't be able to provide the drive because of "not enough drive letters".

On the other hand though, limiting the drive letter to the last available cd/dvd drive in your system will save about 1kb of conventional memory.

Coming back to the main topic, try to use only one UMB provider. And if I'm not mistaken, the games you mentioned do not require EMS memory, which will put the system in real mode (correct me if I'm wrong - always get confused here. 😁). And these games are protected mode games.

And finally, disable smartdrv's write behind cache (/x switch), if you're using it. I've noticed lockups when this is enabled while running certain protected mode games like Terminator Skynet.

Otherwise, smartdrv is ok.

Well if you think about that, what happens is that you have one extra drive letter if you don't specify extras with LASTDRIVE. Like the docs say, DOS only knows about drives assigned in config.sys. CDROMs are assigned drive letters in autoexec by mscdex. So if you have more than one CDROM, you may not have enough drive letters.

The strange thing is I seem to recall having two CDROMs and not specifying LASTDRIVE and not having problems.... You say you are getting down to H: and I: though and I never have that many in my old rigs.

I'm going to guess that some CDROM drivers in config.sys indicate to DOS that extra drive letters are needed.