Ah, the wasted hours of IRQ mole whacking to make the sound card AND the cdrom drive to both work at the same time ...
MS-DOS is 30 years old today
11–20 of 30 posts
Re: MS-DOS is 30 years old today
#12Getting Wing Commander to run with sound and a joystick was fun.
Re: MS-DOS is 30 years old today
#13Sweet DOS memories. I could probably still remember how to write CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files that wring out every possible byte of <640K memory so that Ultima VII would run. (This game had a home-grown memory manager which required an obscene ~620K of so-called "real" memory while also requiring certain drivers that ate into that real memory, making it difficult to run the game without manually customizing the…
ahem.
LOADHIGH=c:\mouse\mouse.sys
Re: MS-DOS is 30 years old today
#14Sweet DOS memories. I could probably still remember how to write CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files that wring out every possible byte of <640K memory so that Ultima VII would run. (This game had a home-grown memory manager which required an obscene ~620K of so-called "real" memory while also requiring certain drivers that ate into that real memory, making it difficult to run the game without manually customizing the…
ahem. LOADHIGH=c:\mouse\mouse.sys
On my PC it required something else, making the boot files not quite that trivial. Maybe it was the sound card, or maybe it was due to the oddball MicroChannel bus and ESDI hard disk on that IBM PS/2 -- I can't remember.
Re: MS-DOS is 30 years old today
#15Sweet DOS memories. I could probably still remember how to write CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files that wring out every possible byte of <640K memory so that Ultima VII would run. (This game had a home-grown memory manager which required an obscene ~620K of so-called "real" memory while also requiring certain drivers that ate into that real memory, making it difficult to run the game without manually customizing the…
I always had the same experience getting TIE Fighter to run. Mostly it was a combination of LH's and DOS=HIGH,UMB which did the trick.
That and a trial and error process of reordering CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT entries along with interactive boot which always reminded me of that scene from Apollo 13 when they are trying to determine the powerup sequence for the command module.
Re: MS-DOS is 30 years old today
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
ahem. LOADHIGH=c:\mouse\mouse.sys
On my PC it required something else, making the boot files not quite that trivial. Maybe it was the sound card, or maybe it was due to the oddball MicroChannel bus and ESDI hard disk on that IBM PS/2 -- I can't remember.
I'm glad we don't have to do that stuff anymore just to play a game.
Re: MS-DOS is 30 years old today
#17Thanks DOS.
When I first saw a computer I thought it was a type of typewriter.
Re: MS-DOS is 30 years old today
#18Sweet DOS memories. I could probably still remember how to write CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files that wring out every possible byte of <640K memory so that Ultima VII would run. (This game had a home-grown memory manager which required an obscene ~620K of so-called "real" memory while also requiring certain drivers that ate into that real memory, making it difficult to run the game without manually customizing the…
ahem. LOADHIGH=c:\mouse\mouse.sys
No, it was DEVICEHIGH= in config.sys to load .SYS drivers, and LOADHIGH (without an equals sign) in autoexec.bat to load an .EXE.
Re: MS-DOS is 30 years old today
#19Ah, the innocuous days of MS-DOS. Best game was definitely Flight Simulator IMO. I remember playing it for hours every day with my Logitech joystick. By the way, that joystick has a free game called Slipstream 5000 with it. Anyone else remember playing that?
Re: MS-DOS is 30 years old today
#20Brings back memories of programming QBasic in the MS-DOS shell on Windows 98. Ah, those were the days.