IIRC, one of the similar old story from Raymond Chen is about SimCity 2000, that did a similar trick (free memory, then start immediately using it) that worked

IIRC, one of the similar old story from Raymond Chen is about SimCity 2000, that did a similar trick (free memory, then start immediately using it) that worked just fine under DOS, but was a big no-no starting with Windows 95. The game was so common that Windows had to include a special rule to make it run...