Using Quick Menu III too, since it's so highly customizable.

On low-spec systems, I use the DOS Shell from MS-DOS 5.0 instead.

Yip it certainly is very customizable. I'll have a dig through the rest of my ye oldey software for more. I'm sure I have a few OEM ones that came with system I'd acquired over the years to take pics of. There was one freeware vga one that was very polished . It was done by a German chap I think.

On ET4000/1MB it does produce wiered errors. In EGA-Mode it's OK, but therefore the ET4000 needs to be switched to ega "vmode ega"
and then the started game does only recognize EGA. I would love to use qm3 on my A2286/6 with ET4000.

That's easy to solve. Create a small batch file as a starter for games. Something like:

@echo off
vmode vga
%1
vmode ega

Then instead of using "c:\games\whatever\game.exe" to start a game from QM3, you use "start.bat c:\games\whatever\game.exe".

I considered this already, but there must be another Solution for getting no error's with an ET4000.
QM3 should have been tested on this tseng-cards. Perhaps it's because the cpu 286/8 is too slow?
I do not have a 386/486 with ET4000. All I have is an ET400/w32 onboard on a 486/dx2/66 but
there are no glitches.

Another vote for QM3 here. Totally awesome.

powermenu was a nice text mode one.

"Desktop 2" from Felix Ritter is also quite nice. Similar to QuikMenu but with some additional functions to make it more OS-like. Did not use it yet apart from some testing, however.

There's an English version of it as well.

I never knew any of these existed back in the day.

I did use DOSSHELL and also have config.sys and autoexec.bat menus set up though.

How much RAM do these menu programs use up? Do they affect the speed of other programs running? I am guessing they don't exit themselves when a program is run from them.

cyclone3d wrote:

How much RAM do these menu programs use up? Do they affect the speed of other programs running? I am guessing they don't exit themselves when a program is run from them.

They don't affect speed. They also use almost no RAM. At least the ones I know work similar to DOS Shell: launching a program removes the menu from memory and hands control over to a batch file, which re-loads the menu after the program has ended.

I used DOSSHELL a long time ago, but I since dispensed with menus because of the memory footprint.

I never used dosshell because it's so slow if you have lot's of files. I am a nc/vc user since 1988.

The smallest and fastest menu-system I have and probably will use on my A2286 is called "hard-disk-manager"
and I found it on my neighbors 8088xt laptop which he had purchased in the us and brought it
back to germany.

derSammler wrote:

"Desktop 2" from Felix Ritter is also quite nice. Similar to QuikMenu but with some additional functions to make it more OS-like. Did not use it yet apart from some testing, however.

That is the one I was thinking of. Magic Desk 3 iirc is another graphical Dos menu. Couldn't find it on the interweb. My search foo seems down today. I have a disk here with Magic Desk on it so will fire it up on the 286 sometime and post a pic.

This?

(Fans of Tech-Express may recognize this 😀 )

That is the one. Used it in one system at one stage.

yesterday I configured the basic-stuff on my A2286/8 with "The Hard-Disk-Manager" and all I can tell you is, that's superbe and fast.
I will defently use this for XT/AT/Tandy machines. 386+ I will go for something like QM3.

On GeoWorks Ensemble 1.2 Pro there is area you can set up to run Dos programs.

It was dropped from later versions of PC Geos.

Neat stuff. Going to try it out later.

Probably one of the more well known old pre-Quikmenu menus was Automenu (in the US anyway).

Here's a shot of Automenu 4.7 from 1990