Who remembers having to use boot disc's for games

newbidood

newbidood

newbidood

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Remeber buying that brand new copy of Xwing, getting it home, installing the game, then spending the next hour trying to write a boot disc so you could actually play the game.

Lots of little boot disc's all for different games, then games started giving you an option to make a boot disc for you.

Kids, they dont know they are born these days, what with all these flash PC's and stuff. :D
 
Boot disk? Pfft. For Doom2 I used to bareboot (hold down shift while booting DOS).

Populous 2 was a bit of a nightmare though, I was never actually able to get it working with 8bit colour AND sound, no matter how much conventional memory I was able to free up.
 
I remember the pre pc/amiga computer days when pong was cutting edge, when cartridges were the only thing out for the old atari systems and when loading a game involved screeching from your tape deck. I can't actually remember needing to make a boot disk to run any games in the past or my memory is going and forgetting i did.

SCM
 
The worst game ever for me to get to work was a game called "Aces Over Europe" - a WWII flight sim from Sierra/Dynamix. It required 608K of conventional memory to run. I think I had to rem out my mouse driver to get it to work.

Remember when DOS 6 came out and it had a program called memmaker? That was sweet, as you didn't really have to edit the config.sys/autoexec.bat yourself (in theory!)
 
boot discs weren't cool, boot menus via autoexec batch files were where the cool kids were :)

I think at one point I had about 15 or more setups on my boot menu...
 
All with different options for memory (EMS, XMS), cd rom driver loaded or not, mouse driver, etc, etc. Ahhh fun times!
 
Dunno why people make out it was so bad. First game I experienced it in was Ultima Underworld 2. Installed the game, ran the executable and got some random error. Rather than panic I checked the manual which told me I needed at least 2MB of Extended Memory and gave me detailed instructions on how to make a boot disk with the necessary commands. I was up and running within the hour, and knew what autoexec.bat did after that :p
 
Ah the joys of having to manually manage that 640k of memory. Things haven't moved on much have they :D
 
Dolph said:
boot discs weren't cool, boot menus via autoexec batch files were where the cool kids were :)

I think at one point I had about 15 or more setups on my boot menu...
Click to expand...

That's exactly what I used to do.

I remember my first PC was a 486 SX25 (25Mhz processor) with 1 Meg Ram, running DOS 5.0. It had a 40Mb HDD.

I remember upgrading to windows 3.11, installing a co-processor to make it a DX and spending £240 on a 300Mb HDD (in the sales!!!).

Used to have to reconfigure memory settings for almost every game i purchased. They were the days.... (much better than my old Amstrad CPC PC with tape drive - 16 K Ram if I recall....)
 
I remember desperately trying to get games to work and generally getting absolutely nowhere with "not enough conventional memory" errors. Someone once told me that if you ran memmaker enough times in a row then it made lots and lots of memory so it would run, believe it or not it never seemed to work...
 
Reading this brings back many memories of DOS Games. I remember buying a Star Trek game (I think being 10 years ago) and it must have took me about 2 hours to tweak the start up disk, as I was 2k short of meeting the 580k of conventional memory, and no matter what I tried of XMS, EMS, memmaker, loading the CD Drivers, sound, mouse, I was always short until I managed to crack it and it ran.

Happy days messing with config.sys and autoexec.bat files and unload any TSR that is not needed.
 
SCM said:
I remember the pre pc/amiga computer days when pong was cutting edge, when cartridges were the only thing out for the old atari systems and when loading a game involved screeching from your tape deck. I can't actually remember needing to make a boot disk to run any games in the past or my memory is going and forgetting i did.

SCM
Click to expand...

Same :D and elite on the speccy you had to put that lens thing against the tv screen and input the letters it didn't work for me half the time
 
LOL don't forget to load your himem.sys.

I used to have 2 load disks for EMS and XMS.

Deks
 
And running Memmaker on my 366 SX 33, Commander Keen, Duke Nukem, i even had flight sim5 run from dos...

How annoying was getting a game running and forgetting to run the mouse drivers first...! ?

Mike
 
Pff! You Microsoft paeons! With DR-DOS 6.0 and some some HMA fiddling I had more conventional memory free on my 286 than ANY of my friends with fancy 32-bit 386s and 486s and MS-DOS 5 or 6! :)
 
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