4 ms·

Those were the days...I remember getting a brand new game, loading it and getting "You need at least 587 KiB of conventional memory to run this game". Check the

Those were the days...I remember getting a brand new game, loading it and getting "You need at least 587 KiB of conventional memory to run this game". Check the autoexec.bat and config.sys for anything I didn't need. Do I really need to use the mouse? No. Remove the mouse.com. CTRL-ALT-DELETE. Became very familiar with that combo. Type MEM. Still only 577 KiB..What else? LOADHIGH and DEVICEHIGH - Now we're in business! 595 KiB - Awesome! Oh no. My dad's coming home and he won't allow me to mess with the config files. What did I change... Then I learned about boot disks. And with DOS4/GW all problems were gone. Never knew the technical reasons for the limitations but this article brought back a lot of memories.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
DrJokepu 8y ago
> Then I learned about boot disks. And with DOS4/GW all problems were gone. Actually, I think MS-DOS 6.0 added CONFIG.SYS boot menus, which made it unnecessary to mess around with boot disks (but it didn't help with your dad discovering that you have been messing with the CONFIG.SYS).
- rvanmil 8y ago
  Boot menus were great, I remember having many of them optimized for different games. Also MEMMAKER.EXE, I spent a lot of time playing with that tool squeezing out the last byte of memory :)
- Keyframe 8y ago
  Hah, I love this. You've reminded me of something I completely forgot it existed. Yet, at that point in time, it was almost everything daily computer usage revolved around.
- gerdesj 8y ago
  "Actually, I think MS-DOS 6.0 added CONFIG.SYS" No, config.sys was a thing from day 1. Getting the bloody memory setup on MS stuff right was a nightmare and wasted a lot of time.
  - akavel 8y ago
    "...added config.sys boot menus", is what the parent comment says
    - gerdesj 8y ago
      I have an idea about what I'm on about: https://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/tools/14053.html https://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/tools/14053.html (I'm Jon)
      - jackfraser 8y ago
        Yeah no I'm sure you do, but you didn't read the comment, he's talking about the native INI-style syntax for boot menus baked into the DOS 6.0 kernel that allows you to specify multiple different CONFIG.SYS sections, and lets you pass an option to your AUTOEXEC.BAT containing the config name so it can finish the job off. A must for anyone who ran a different config for different scenarios. I often ran without CD-ROM drivers to get a couple K more memory for the pickiest programs.
      - ChrisClark 8y ago
        But not in this case, the menu system was not there on day 1.
agumonkey 8y ago
One day I decided to fool around with memory managers (out of boredom). I managed to fubar the MBR or something similar. Free trip to the computer shop, 200$ for restore and backup tape drive (the shop owner made himself a nice sell on a HP Colorado T1000 [still working]).
- pjc50 8y ago
  Similarly I once blew away the partition table and had to manually reconstruct it with the only available tool, MSDOS debug.com and a copy of Peter Norton's book.
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    glorious, you're kragen ready https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9x15g/programming_thought_experiment_stuck_in_a_room/c0ewj2c/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9x15g/programm... https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/15irc4/a_great_comment_that_was_largely_ignored_3_years/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/15irc4/a_great_comm...
gerdesj 8y ago
"Those were the days." No they were not. I wasted a huge amount of time getting this to work. I created a golden Novell IPX and IP boot disc. It was published on Cool Solutions so it must have been good. No it wasn't.
- shin_lao 8y ago
  And you learned a lot of things while doing that... So is it really time wasted?
  - tom_ 8y ago
    I did the same. I had smartdrv, and I used as necessary the option that gave an alternative UMB/conventional tradeoff, possibly giving more room for some other driver that was loaded later. I used mscdex, of course, and fiddled with its buffer settings to get the best memory/performance tradeoff. I tried more than ten mouse drivers before finally finding the one with the best EXE size/resident size/acceleration curve tradeoff, so I could play Doom without going mad while still being able to load games that needed 600+K conventional memory. I did all the shit, that I now can't even remember, to get IPX and TCP/IP running, which included whatever thing you did to merge your card driver and the other thing (LSL? ODI? I dunno...) into one EXE or COM or whatever it was. There was some other stuff too, I'm sure of it - even part from that EMM386 option that put the EMS page frame at the end of the HMA, to minimize fragmentation - because I knew all the tricks, deployed them all as required, and in the end my PC had something like 620K conventional memory free with just ordinary HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE. No QEMM necessary. What use is any of this these days? None, that's what. None at all. Even at the time, most of the good games used DOS4GW, so you only needed 500K free. You'd have to be a proper completist to bother with this stuff. I guess I don't regret it, because it was more fun than trying to install fucking Linux, but overall it really was time wasted. (One strange thing that's stuck: 25 years on, I still use the US keyboard layout. I never bothered loading KEYB.COM, because that took up nearly 30K, and it hardly seemed worth it when most of the keys were the same... and one day I suppose the wind changed, because here I still am.)
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  > I wasted a huge amount of time getting this to work. The more things change the more they stay the same I guess. As Rick Moranis once put it, "Fuck! Even in the future nothing works!".
quickthrower2 8y ago
I like that you can get in trouble with your dad for this. Smart and naughty at the same time.
IncRnd 8y ago
Ah, the good old days, where this worked. Amazingly, it even worked later in DESQview. jmp word 0xffff:0000
superasn 8y ago
I remember the sound card and the things one had to do to get it working. All the IRQ(?) settings and IRQ is already assigned errors. On top of that DOS games came with their own sound drivers and there were only two options adlib and sound blaster pro (again IIRC). I think configuring the game and making it work perfectly was more fun and rewarding than playing the game itself sometimes.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

DrJokepu 8y ago

> Then I learned about boot disks. And with DOS4/GW all problems were gone. Actually, I think MS-DOS 6.0 added CONFIG.SYS boot menus, which made it unnecessary to mess around with boot disks (but it didn't help with your dad discovering that you have been messing with the CONFIG.SYS).

rvanmil 8y ago
Boot menus were great, I remember having many of them optimized for different games. Also MEMMAKER.EXE, I spent a lot of time playing with that tool squeezing out the last byte of memory :)
Keyframe 8y ago
Hah, I love this. You've reminded me of something I completely forgot it existed. Yet, at that point in time, it was almost everything daily computer usage revolved around.
gerdesj 8y ago
"Actually, I think MS-DOS 6.0 added CONFIG.SYS" No, config.sys was a thing from day 1. Getting the bloody memory setup on MS stuff right was a nightmare and wasted a lot of time.
- akavel 8y ago
  "...added config.sys boot menus", is what the parent comment says
  - gerdesj 8y ago
    I have an idea about what I'm on about: https://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/tools/14053.html https://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/tools/14053.html (I'm Jon)
    - jackfraser 8y ago
      Yeah no I'm sure you do, but you didn't read the comment, he's talking about the native INI-style syntax for boot menus baked into the DOS 6.0 kernel that allows you to specify multiple different CONFIG.SYS sections, and lets you pass an option to your AUTOEXEC.BAT containing the config name so it can finish the job off. A must for anyone who ran a different config for different scenarios. I often ran without CD-ROM drivers to get a couple K more memory for the pickiest programs.
    - ChrisClark 8y ago
      But not in this case, the menu system was not there on day 1.

agumonkey 8y ago

One day I decided to fool around with memory managers (out of boredom). I managed to fubar the MBR or something similar. Free trip to the computer shop, 200$ for restore and backup tape drive (the shop owner made himself a nice sell on a HP Colorado T1000 [still working]).

pjc50 8y ago
Similarly I once blew away the partition table and had to manually reconstruct it with the only available tool, MSDOS debug.com and a copy of Peter Norton's book.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  glorious, you're kragen ready https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9x15g/programming_thought_experiment_stuck_in_a_room/c0ewj2c/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9x15g/programm... https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/15irc4/a_great_comment_that_was_largely_ignored_3_years/ https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/15irc4/a_great_comm...

gerdesj 8y ago

"Those were the days." No they were not. I wasted a huge amount of time getting this to work. I created a golden Novell IPX and IP boot disc. It was published on Cool Solutions so it must have been good. No it wasn't.

shin_lao 8y ago
And you learned a lot of things while doing that... So is it really time wasted?
- tom_ 8y ago
  I did the same. I had smartdrv, and I used as necessary the option that gave an alternative UMB/conventional tradeoff, possibly giving more room for some other driver that was loaded later. I used mscdex, of course, and fiddled with its buffer settings to get the best memory/performance tradeoff. I tried more than ten mouse drivers before finally finding the one with the best EXE size/resident size/acceleration curve tradeoff, so I could play Doom without going mad while still being able to load games that needed 600+K conventional memory. I did all the shit, that I now can't even remember, to get IPX and TCP/IP running, which included whatever thing you did to merge your card driver and the other thing (LSL? ODI? I dunno...) into one EXE or COM or whatever it was. There was some other stuff too, I'm sure of it - even part from that EMM386 option that put the EMS page frame at the end of the HMA, to minimize fragmentation - because I knew all the tricks, deployed them all as required, and in the end my PC had something like 620K conventional memory free with just ordinary HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE. No QEMM necessary. What use is any of this these days? None, that's what. None at all. Even at the time, most of the good games used DOS4GW, so you only needed 500K free. You'd have to be a proper completist to bother with this stuff. I guess I don't regret it, because it was more fun than trying to install fucking Linux, but overall it really was time wasted. (One strange thing that's stuck: 25 years on, I still use the US keyboard layout. I never bothered loading KEYB.COM, because that took up nearly 30K, and it hardly seemed worth it when most of the keys were the same... and one day I suppose the wind changed, because here I still am.)
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
> I wasted a huge amount of time getting this to work. The more things change the more they stay the same I guess. As Rick Moranis once put it, "Fuck! Even in the future nothing works!".

quickthrower2 8y ago

I like that you can get in trouble with your dad for this. Smart and naughty at the same time.

IncRnd 8y ago

Ah, the good old days, where this worked. Amazingly, it even worked later in DESQview. jmp word 0xffff:0000

superasn 8y ago

I remember the sound card and the things one had to do to get it working. All the IRQ(?) settings and IRQ is already assigned errors. On top of that DOS games came with their own sound drivers and there were only two options adlib and sound blaster pro (again IIRC). I think configuring the game and making it work perfectly was more fun and rewarding than playing the game itself sometimes.