EMM386 only became the defacto standard for games around 1993 or so. Prior to that developers would purchase or create a solution from scratch to deal with the

EMM386 only became the defacto standard for games around 1993 or so. Prior to that developers would purchase or create a solution from scratch to deal with the rapidly shifting PC development environment. A decent chunk of the market was still on 286, and this was the most likely target for the first Wing Commander (1990) - later games from Origin such as Ultima 7 and Privateer continued using memory extenders branded "Voodoo" and "JEMM" that were known to run in unreal mode[0] - they were generally a nightmare for users as they were less stable than EMM386 and typically had a huge conventional memory minimum requirement, but it was tolerated as what one had to go through to play high end PC games. [0] http://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Voodoo_Memory_Manager http://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Voodoo_Memory_Manager