4 ms·

Or what about `himem`? I remember I had to do that command first. Otherwise, something in railroad tycoon or Civ would not work. I don’t recall exactly what it

by spockz 4y ago

Or what about `himem`? I remember I had to do that command first. Otherwise, something in railroad tycoon or Civ would not work. I don’t recall exactly what it was, the pointer, high res colour graphics, or sound or maybe the combination of the above. I just knew I had to type that first. Didn’t have a clue at the time what it was.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
iso1631 4y ago
Come dos 6 there were menu options in config.sys you could use to load different parts of your hardware depending on what you wanted, they also could do different things in autoexec.bat too. Before that you could just have different boot floppies. My memory had himem.sys as a config.sys option though, with various numbers you could pass to it. EMM386 was another one too. It was tricky to work out what you could do - a lot of trial and error, this was in the pre-internet time (at least for the typical home user), so things tended to come from hints in magazines.
- rchaud 4y ago
  Wow, I remember this! As a kid, I remember taking my computer to an IT shop asking how to run a copy of Ultima VI on my Pentium II MMX PC. The tech there had it for a week, and they figured it out by setting up autoexec.bat so that I had to allow/disallow some processes from booting one by one. Apparently one of those tricks was reducing the amount of available memory, or something like that. That was the hack that got U6 to boot and be playable at a normal speed. This would have been in 1998 or so, so my memories of the exact fix are pretty faint.
ghaff 4y ago
To be fair, the Mac alternative at the time was "Don't do that." DOS and the PC (and add-ons like expanded memory) provided a bunch of ways for sophisticated users to do things that weren't quite possible with stock configurations. (Basically there was memory between 640K and 1MB that could be used in various ways but it required the right incantations.) My general recollection from being a DOS power user (and developer) and a very sometime Mac user in that era was that Macs were less likely to be "problematic" but when something did go wrong, you had far fewer tools and observability to work around the problem.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  That period didn’t last very long, though — by 1986, the Mac Plus had a megabyte of memory standard, and still a flat address space — no HIMEM required. On the second point, generally the hardware was reliable, and Mac users had tools available to diagnose software issues. There just wasn’t any printing stuff to a console.
- yardie 4y ago
  The Mac from that era had a built-in hardware debugger. Literally pressing the button on the front of the case dropped you straight into Macsbugs. Something I used extensively to crack software copy protection. If you knew Macsbugs, ResEdit and Codewarrior you had complete control of your software and hardware.
  - eludwig 4y ago
    >>Literally pressing the button on the front of the case dropped you straight into Macsbugs. Or better yet, TMON[1]! What an amazing debugger. I spent many hours in there, trying to figure out why the 64K ROM was stepping all over registers that were supposed to be protected by particular ROM traps. (to be fair, there were not too many of these, and they were all eventually patched by system updates) [1] https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1400-tmon https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1400-tmon
- GeekyBear 4y ago
  > To be fair, the Mac alternative at the time was "Don't do that." Well, no. The Mac alternative to DOS TSRs that loaded in High Memory would be Desk Accessories. >Introduced in 1984 as part of the operating system for the Apple Macintosh computer, a Desk Accessory (DA) was a piece of software written as a device driver, conforming to a particular programming model. The purpose of this model was to permit very small helper-type applications to be run concurrently with any other application on the system. This provided a small degree of multitasking on a system that initially did not have any other multitasking ability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desk_accessory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desk_accessory

by spockz 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

iso1631 4y ago

Come dos 6 there were menu options in config.sys you could use to load different parts of your hardware depending on what you wanted, they also could do different things in autoexec.bat too. Before that you could just have different boot floppies. My memory had himem.sys as a config.sys option though, with various numbers you could pass to it. EMM386 was another one too. It was tricky to work out what you could do - a lot of trial and error, this was in the pre-internet time (at least for the typical home user), so things tended to come from hints in magazines.

rchaud 4y ago
Wow, I remember this! As a kid, I remember taking my computer to an IT shop asking how to run a copy of Ultima VI on my Pentium II MMX PC. The tech there had it for a week, and they figured it out by setting up autoexec.bat so that I had to allow/disallow some processes from booting one by one. Apparently one of those tricks was reducing the amount of available memory, or something like that. That was the hack that got U6 to boot and be playable at a normal speed. This would have been in 1998 or so, so my memories of the exact fix are pretty faint.

ghaff 4y ago

To be fair, the Mac alternative at the time was "Don't do that." DOS and the PC (and add-ons like expanded memory) provided a bunch of ways for sophisticated users to do things that weren't quite possible with stock configurations. (Basically there was memory between 640K and 1MB that could be used in various ways but it required the right incantations.) My general recollection from being a DOS power user (and developer) and a very sometime Mac user in that era was that Macs were less likely to be "problematic" but when something did go wrong, you had far fewer tools and observability to work around the problem.

KerrAvon 4y ago
That period didn’t last very long, though — by 1986, the Mac Plus had a megabyte of memory standard, and still a flat address space — no HIMEM required. On the second point, generally the hardware was reliable, and Mac users had tools available to diagnose software issues. There just wasn’t any printing stuff to a console.
yardie 4y ago
The Mac from that era had a built-in hardware debugger. Literally pressing the button on the front of the case dropped you straight into Macsbugs. Something I used extensively to crack software copy protection. If you knew Macsbugs, ResEdit and Codewarrior you had complete control of your software and hardware.
- eludwig 4y ago
  >>Literally pressing the button on the front of the case dropped you straight into Macsbugs. Or better yet, TMON[1]! What an amazing debugger. I spent many hours in there, trying to figure out why the 64K ROM was stepping all over registers that were supposed to be protected by particular ROM traps. (to be fair, there were not too many of these, and they were all eventually patched by system updates) [1] https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1400-tmon https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1400-tmon
GeekyBear 4y ago
> To be fair, the Mac alternative at the time was "Don't do that." Well, no. The Mac alternative to DOS TSRs that loaded in High Memory would be Desk Accessories. >Introduced in 1984 as part of the operating system for the Apple Macintosh computer, a Desk Accessory (DA) was a piece of software written as a device driver, conforming to a particular programming model. The purpose of this model was to permit very small helper-type applications to be run concurrently with any other application on the system. This provided a small degree of multitasking on a system that initially did not have any other multitasking ability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desk_accessory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desk_accessory