7 Terrible Things About PC-DOS Gaming

Neil79

Neil79

Neil79

Caporegime
Joined
8 Sep 2006
Posts
39,320
Location
On Ocuk
Audio was a perticular problem for me. Glad most things just work these days... I couldn't be annoyed with it nowadays!
 
I miss those days a lot. But extended memory and soundcard setups were a pain. Only multiplayer I remembered doing was doom, via bulletin boards
 
Getting 605kb memory free for some games was a pain in the neck. Thank goodness games went over to using DOS4GW which handled extra memory much better.

Remember Microsoft Memmaker? Custom boot menus for DOS games and Windows?
 
Aaarrrgghhhhh!! Noooooo. These kids today don't know they're born ee-by-gum. Oh the days of spending hours creating multiple boot disks with finely honed autoexec.bat and config.sys files. One disk for max conventional memory, one disk for XMS, one disk for EMS, all the above with or without mouse, cd etc etc. Aaaahhhhh such sweet reminiscence.

Wow the rose tint on my spectacles is pretty thick today ;)
 
Neil79 said:
Extended Memory setups was the worst for me , " sorry you don't have enough ems memory "

arrgh :(
Click to expand...


I *think* that ems was expanded memory, xms was extended memory [/pedantic]...I only remember as Desert Strike was an absolute swine to run as it required about 580kb of ems...arrraaagghhhh!!!

Tie Fighter was another swine...one of my proudest moments was writing my own boot disk that allowed me to play it easily...a skill I've long since forgotten!
 
It took me a while, but I wrote a DOS startup menu with 5 different boot options for extended and expanded mem and suchlike, and I could just sit back and scoff at mates who were going through the same awful crap every time they got a new game.

All it took to run a game was to test these configs one by one through reboot until I found the working one, add that to the choice menu and that was all.

Gave quite a feeling of achievement at the time.
 
"This is not a QEMM error, but QEMM is reporting the error" - argh! I don't think it ever told you what the error actually was though.

That was one of my particular favorites to scream at.
 
MSCDEX. Bane of my life for about six months, then suddenly it clicked.
Also, IO = 220 IRQ = 5, DMA = 1. Can't remember what they refer to now, but still remember the numbers.

Edit - oh yeah, there they are in the article :)
 
It's pretty true to say that those of us who grew up in those days acquired a healthy dose of problem solving ability. If a kid has a problem with a game today, I know plenty who simply have no idea how to fix it. Even when these problems are relatively minor, today's gamers often give up before they've really tried.
 
Masterdog said:
MSCDEX. Bane of my life for about six months, then suddenly it clicked.
Also, IO = 220 IRQ = 5, DMA = 1. Can't remember what they refer to now, but still remember the numbers.

Edit - oh yeah, there they are in the article :)
Click to expand...
Without reading the article I would say sound card settings, back in the day of Soundblaster 16.

[edit]I was right, damn i'm old :( [/edit]
 
Last edited:
I remember trying to create my 1st boot disk and removing the autoexec.bat and config.sys from the c: drive.

I think we only had the pc (dx2/66) for a week! This was the 1st time i got the sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach, normally reserved for hardware failures and catastrophic data loss :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom