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My first "tech job" was doing support in the late 90s for DOS games at EA. At that point most folks had computers with 8 or 16MB of RAM. One of the old Jane's

My first "tech job" was doing support in the late 90s for DOS games at EA. At that point most folks had computers with 8 or 16MB of RAM. One of the old Jane's Flight simulator games had a check for minimum RAM requirements which for some reason would overflow at 128MB and say you didn't meet minimum memory requirements. So these folks would spend around $1000 on memory to build premium machines with 128MB and then get these old games which would say they couldn't play the game due to insufficient memory. The fix was to create a RAM drive which would caption of part of the RAM available to storage and leave a limited amount of available RAM to run the game which would clear the memory validation. I believe at one point someone was able to actually install a game into the RAM Drive and play it on the left over available RAM but it required a game that could be installed and played without a reboot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM_drive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM_drive

simias 13y ago
I've had a similar issue with an old game, I think it was "Broken Sword", when I tried to install it on a newer machine except the problem was not RAM but hard disk space. The setup was attempting to find out how much space was left on the disk before install but the counter wrapped around since I had several hundreds of GB free on my disk which was probably an insanely large amount in 1996 when the game was released. Anyway, my "clever" solution back then had been to fill up my disk enough before the install so that the setup would detect more free space.
ek 13y ago
Hah! That even happens with fairly modern games, like the PC port of Grand Theft Auto IV. The game could not fathom that I have 3GB of VRAM. You would think game developers might have wised up by now and added a few extra bits to whichever field stores that number, for futureproofing purposes.
sampk 13y ago
Dick move to refuse running the game anyway, just show a notice and have a "Continue" button.
- Wingman4l7 13y ago
  Well, maybe a message more along the lines of "Hey, this game isn't built to run on so little RAM, you're going to have a terrible gaming experience, so don't you dare blame us and tell people our game sucks."

simias 13y ago

I've had a similar issue with an old game, I think it was "Broken Sword", when I tried to install it on a newer machine except the problem was not RAM but hard disk space. The setup was attempting to find out how much space was left on the disk before install but the counter wrapped around since I had several hundreds of GB free on my disk which was probably an insanely large amount in 1996 when the game was released. Anyway, my "clever" solution back then had been to fill up my disk enough before the install so that the setup would detect more free space.

ek 13y ago

Hah! That even happens with fairly modern games, like the PC port of Grand Theft Auto IV. The game could not fathom that I have 3GB of VRAM. You would think game developers might have wised up by now and added a few extra bits to whichever field stores that number, for futureproofing purposes.

sampk 13y ago

Dick move to refuse running the game anyway, just show a notice and have a "Continue" button.

Wingman4l7 13y ago
Well, maybe a message more along the lines of "Hey, this game isn't built to run on so little RAM, you're going to have a terrible gaming experience, so don't you dare blame us and tell people our game sucks."