Running My games through Dos in The Olden Days

Dohc-WP

Dohc-WP

Ron Burgundy
When i recieved my first true gaming pc it was ages better than the Nes clone I had at the time and the playstation was a fairly new console that was flipping expensive(so i couldnt afford one). Windows 95 was fairly new and I was still running ms dos 6.22 and windows 3.1. on my trusty old 486 dx4 100 (which was overclocked back then to 120mhz if you increased the Fsb to 40 by moving a jumper on the motherboard), it had 16 mb of ram and a 4 mb trident Vesa video card, And No Direct X wasnt even a word on anyone's mind back then.

running a Dos game in windows 3.1 flawlessly was a mission back the so to play a game like tomb raider or duke nukem I had to exit windows into ms dos mode then at the prompt i had to type in commands like :

c:\ cd tr1
c:\tr\setup.exe

which then gives you a setup program to config your sound card (you had to know what irq and dma range your sound card used , otherwise you had no sounds ingame :p)

something like this​

DOS-Gaming-Back-in-the-day.jpeg


after you save and exit the config the you had to type in the games exe file to run it at the command prompt ie c:\tr\tomb.exe and only then you can finally play.


Hell we have a progressed alot :p

Notable dos games

star wars dark forces
duke nukem 3d (obviaaaaaaaasly)
tomb raider
golden axe
shadow warrior
Need For Speed 1
doom and quake (quake ran on a 486 but it was slooow, the first true pentium game imo)
mortal kombat 3
Hexen

oh and California Games​

s_CaliforniaGames_7.png
 
Dohc-WP said:
star wars dark forces
duke nukem 3d (obviaaaaaaaasly)
tomb raider
golden axe
shadow warrior
Need For Speed 1
doom and quake (quake ran on a 486 but it was slooow, the first true pentium game imo)
mortal kombat 3
Hexen
Click to expand...

I remember Dark forces, Shadow Warrior and Hexen!! :)

Dohc you also forgot to mention Heretic, it was a spin off from Hexen wasn't it??
 
LOL @ California Games...Back in primary school (prob 1994) there were 2 PC's in the lab that had California Games and Shinobi on and we used to rush to queue first in line to get one of those 2 PC's. Nice to reminisce...
 
Oh I remember DOS, going back many, many years, to tweaking it to get the last little bit of memory out of it just so I could play a game. Having directories like c:\g just so you knew where your games were and you didn't have to type in games, struggling to get VESA drivers working, getting half arsed sound because you had IRQ clashes. Though from some of the games you've mentioned time period this was mostly out of the window as Windows 95 was out and running a game in DOS was only done if you couldn't run it in 640x480
 
Lupus said:
Oh I remember DOS, going back many, many years, to tweaking it to get the last little bit of memory out of it just so I could play a game. Having directories like c:\g just so you knew where your games were and you didn't have to type in games, struggling to get VESA drivers working, getting half arsed sound because you had IRQ clashes. Though from some of the games you've mentioned time period this was mostly out of the window as Windows 95 was out and running a game in DOS was only done if you couldn't run it in 640x480
Click to expand...

street fighter II turbo came out around the same time as windows 95 on pc and that game was a mofo i remember trying to run it in windows 3.1 and it locked up my system, eventually when i upgraded to windows 95 (that OS came on a moerse lot of stiffies) it still didnt want to run.

the problem getting dos games to launch perfectly in windows was that before 95 himem.sys had to be indicated in the autoexec in windows 3.1 otherwise you had constant memory leaks and then the games would crash. i remember TR 1 had a windows executable that was released along with a 3dfx patch for it and quake, which made those games run perfectly in windows (if ou had a 3d fx card)

i see you also remember those vesa video cards, hell they were moers Loooooooooong.
 
I had a VESA card for about two months, then it started to go wonky it was second hand so I didn't have any recourse ;-(
 
IRQ conflicts. How many hours of my life I lost to those.

My 486 DX4 100mhz could run Quake 1 fine in 320x200. Was ugly as hell though.
 
Strifehart said:
IRQ conflicts. How many hours of my life I lost to those.

My 486 DX4 100mhz could run Quake 1 fine in 320x200. Was ugly as hell though.
Click to expand...

those dogs in quake scared the schizz out of me. IRQ conflicts was a nightmare and windows 95 would luck up (the start of the bsod revlution) if a P&P device and a non p&p device had shared the same irq
 
Sorting out software issues! Yes! Trying to figure out which IRQ's belonged to which hardware and digging in the box to change jumpers around. This is something I should have added in my other thread as well. And in the attempt to change a jumper, you dislodged the cable to the hard drive. Then nothing worked and you got those beeping noise wit the POST. The fear of a dead hard drive and the relieve on discovery of the loose cable. And each game wanting a specific type of free memory and just on kb more than what you currently had available.
 
maeztro said:
Sorting out software issues! Yes! Trying to figure out which IRQ's belonged to which hardware and digging in the box to change jumpers around. This is something I should have added in my other thread as well. And in the attempt to change a jumper, you dislodged the cable to the hard drive. Then nothing worked and you got those beeping noise wit the POST. The fear of a dead hard drive and the relieve on discovery of the loose cable. And each game wanting a specific type of free memory and just on kb more than what you currently had available.
Click to expand...

Dude you're bringing back some of my most distant memories. I remember the getting FIFA International Soccer on 3 diskettes from a Korean friend at school. Think I was probably 12/13, then still learning how to use DOS. Everything up to that point, I had learned by writing down all the commands and on that day, my friend had given me similar instructions on how I should install the game. I think he had it archived with arj. My old man didn't really know shit except working in Windows so I had to figure everything out by myself. After battling to install it, I finally got it right but starting the game returned an error that Sound Blaster sound card wasn't configured properly. Went into the setup and probably spent a good hour or so trying to figure out what the hell all these IRQ and DMA(I think) settings were all about. After some trial and error, I exited the setup and typed "fifa". The screen went black and then all of a sudden the EA Sports(it's in the game) splash came up. DUDE!!! Ran to the lounge screaming at my old man that I got it to work. I think I was more happy about the fact that I got it to work rather than playing the game itself. Anyway, I spent the whole night playing the game with my brother.

Damn man, these are really good memories...thanks!
 
I never had the 'privilege' of running my games through Dos... Was brought into the gaming community using exes. ;)
 
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