DOS Games Discussion

I am having trouble getting the following DOS based games to run (win 98 os):

Ravenloft Strahd's Possession
Darksun
Darksun 2
Master of Magic

I have tried numerous things including altering my autoexec.bat and config.sys files. Entries for these are listed at the bottom of the post.

At this point I am wondering about "Dual Boot"? I have partitioned 4 drives: a 9 gig drive, and 1.3, 1.3, 1.3

Could I set up my computer in such a way as to make one of the partitioned drives act completely independent and have DOS installed on it? I have seen some programs at cnet.com that could assist, I am just having trouble understanding the whole concept. Until a few days ago I did not know how to do many things like format a computer or partition a drive.

Any information on this would be appreciated.


About the Ravenloft game, I can get it to run but no matter how I configure the sound settings it will only play either music or sound. My soundblaster is at irq 11 but the game only allows settings below that irq such as 5, 7, 10. Perhaps I could change the irq on my soundblaster? I can run either the game music with a Roland something at 330 address, or with the soundblaster at 220 address and 5 irq.


Below I have detailed my efforts to make the games work:

Made boot disk, boot to dos
Run in windows out of DOS window
Toggle Memory settings in properties of program icon in windows
Loaded DOS mouse drivers
Altered autoexec.bat file for mouse drivers with following lines:
AMOUSE/1
LH C:\MOUSE\MOUSE.COM

Full readout of my Config.sys:
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE RAM D=64 H=255
FILES=100
PRIORITY_DISK_IO=NO
DOS_HIGH=ON
DOS_RMSIZE=640
DPMI_MEMORY_LIMIT=0
DOS=HIGH,UMB
BUFFERS=20

I have a slower computer with a 166 mhz processor I can toy with to get these games working, if necessary. My main computer has a 550 mhz processor pentium III

512 MB to DOS partition. (Say 'Good bye!' to 1 other.) Use fdisk, but move files to other drives first.

FILES= is 10 times too high.

Dual booting is unnecessary unless you're running Windows XP.

Windows 98's full DOS mode would probably fix things. You're still trying to run the games within Windows. To get to full DOS mode proceed as follows -

Right-click the games executables (.exe files in their directories) and select "Create shortcut" from the menu. Drag the shortcut to the desktop or Start Menu if you want to.

Right-click the shortcut and select "Properties" from the menu that appears. Select the "Program" tab and then hit the "Advanced" button. Check the "MS-DOS mode" box and check the "Specify a new MS-DOS configuration" box. Fill in the config.sys and autoexec.bat files.

I'd suggest a barebones config.sys along the lines of -
DOS=HIGH,UMB
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE NOEMS I=B000-B7FF

If your games need Expanded Memory (EMS) instead of Extended Memory (XMS) then change the "NOEMS" above to "RAM" instead.

Leave the FILES, BUFFERS and other settings blank since Windows 98's full DOS mode has adequate defaults for these and we're keeping things simple to troubleshoot.

Make sure you have a SET BLASTER line in your autoexec.bat as well as the necessary lines for your DOS sound driver and mouse driver.

When you're finished just okay your way back out of there and double-click the shortcut. Your machine will reboot and just load DOS 7.10 and the game.

If you get stuck outside of Windows just type "win /w" at the DOS prompt. If you can't get to a DOS prompt then boot with a boot disk and log onto your C: drive by typing "C:" and hitting return. Then type the following lines hitting return at the end of each -
"del config.sys"
"del autoexec.bat"
"ren config.wos config.sys"
"ren autoexec.wos autoexec.bat"

Then reboot and Windows will load as before. I'd be surprised if full DOS mode doesn't do the trick. But I have to say that if you've used a DOS boot disk and that didn't work then there may be something else wrong. Giving DOS its own partition won't work any differently from a boot disk. I recommend experimenting with the autoexec.bat and config.sys of the shortcut to full DOS mode until we get something working.

Good luck.

Damn

Procerus I have been to 8 boards and your post is the best so far.. going to try that

I changed my config.sys and voila! ravenloft game sound works!!

Darksun for some reason cannot finish determining if I have enough memory for the game. It gets stuck with the extended memory, when I type c: in dos then type mem it shows a question mark for used.

Any idea what is going on here? I have a primary partition that I keep everything on, and an extended partition with three 1.3 GB in each logical part.

Thank you for helping me, I have been trying to tackle these problems for the last three days and spent many hours doing research.

If there is a question mark on the line for Extended Memory when you type "mem" then I'm pretty sure you are still in Windows. You are not following my instructions above to make a full DOS mode shortcut ("shelling out" of Windows).

It is confusing. Windows 95 and 98 and 98SE and ME are all pretty desktop GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) that run on top of DOS. But what is really confusing about this is that it is possible to run DOS on top of the GUI too. So you have a copy of DOS with Windows running on top of it with a "console" of DOS running on top of that. This last DOS console is always crippled because it is running within Windows.

If you follow my instructions in the previous post Windows 9* will do as it was designed to do (though few people seem to be in on it for some reason) which is drop out to the perfectly capable DOS below it, removing Windows temporarily, run the game or program and then reboot and reload Windows when you exit the game/program. Windows 9* is a fantastic DOS launcher but you must never use the version of DOS you can run inside Windows with anything that requires DOS and is at all flakey.

BTW in my previous post I made it sound like you could get stuck outside of Windows. This happens extremely rarely but I thought I'd cover it for safety's sake. From full DOS mode typing "Exit" and hitting return is usually enough although using a shortcut with the method I've described will reload Windows automatically when you quit the game.

Also, for Darksun, try it with the "NOEMS" setting and, if that doesn't work, then try it with the "RAM" one.

Sorry if I've misunderstood you and you have followed my instructions to the letter. Your partitions won't make any difference to DOS or Windows. They can both see them all and work with them all. How much memory do you have installed in the machine?

Edit: Or have I misunderstood entirely and you're running XP? You do say "win 98 os" in your first post?

Sound on master of magic not working!!

I had it all nice and set up but got hit with a virus and i dunno maybe something else changed something..

Heres my autoexec.bat

SET BLASTXX=AXXX IXX DX HX PXXX T6
SET SBPCI=C:\SBPCI
AMOUSE\1
rem - By Windows Setup - LH C:\MOUSE\MOUSE.COM
C:\PROGRA~1\COMMON~1\NETWOR~1\VIRUSS~1\40~1.XX\scanpm.exe C:\
@IF ERRORLEVEL 1 PAUSE


Heres my config.sys

DOS=HIGH,UMB
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE RAM I=B000-B7FF


Its possible I changed a setting somewhere because I installed several games after (MOM). Any help would be appreciated and thanks very much for the previous help!

Check sound card configation from system.ini in root directory or setup program and edit file. Command's begining is: SET BLASTER=

I ran Win98 a couple of weeks ago and am now running Win XP home. On both OSs I can run DSUN 2 as well as MoM, so you do not have to muck about with creating a pure DOS partition, booting from DOS disk or similar. While it may be necessary for some games, not that you will need your game files on a FAT or FAT32 partition, not NTFS since you won't be able to access that disk if you boot with DOS.

Quite a bit of text, but all very easy to accomplish. Should take less than 5 minutes to set this up :)

I don't run MoM with sound under XP, since it won't accept my card or possibly its settings: err msg - reconfigure hardware options. However, I've changed computer and have a new card, so I believe it is this, not the OS that screws it up. I have run it with sound under Win98, but getting enough conventional memory is a pain.
In config.sys (for win9x) I believe having
DOS = high, umb
device = c:\windows\system\himem.sys
devicehigh = c:\windows\system32\emm386.exe 4096
in this order will give the most memory. also, you can REMove all the crap in config.sys about
device(high) = ....\display.sys
country=....
by adding "rem " at front of line. i.e.
rem device(high) = ....\display.sys - this line is no longer executed by system


Shortcut to DOS executables are called PIF files (.pif extension). These are a lot to windows like bat files are to dos, sort of. They make the system do a couple of things before the EXE file is executed. r-click them and select properties.
under program tab, set Execute In (i believe this is what it says in english version, second line in any event) to be the directory you have your executable in. Not always necessary, never hurts though.
for instance, with magic.exe in C:\games\magic the first two lines would be:
C:\GAMES\MAGIC\MAGIC.EXE
C:\GAMES\MAGIC

If running XP
==============================================
make copies of config.NT and autoexec.NT to C:\GAMES, hit advanced button and set the two lines to
C:\GAMES\AUTOEXEC.NT and C:\GAMES\CONFIG.NT
and also check the checkbox
Then edit c:\games\config.nt. Add
DOS = high, umb
device = c:\windows\system\himem.sys
EMM = RAM (or 4096 or whatever you need)
in the autoexec.nt file
SET BLASTER=Axxx Ix Dx Pxxx T3
There's info about this in the autoexec.nt file. T3 is the only supported soundblaster mode though. If you need something else, you'd have to use DOSBOX I believe. This MAY be what causes the "reconfigure hardware options" for MoM under XP.
====================================end of XP section

Under memory, you can most likely leave the values at auto. I have at one point on Win 98 managed to get sound for some game (mom or moo I believe) by having less than required memory (by a slight margin) and setting conventional mem value to 560 or 600. Could play around with that.


Note for DSUN2. This game has a bad way to take care of speed modification, or possibly lack it alltogether. While it's still possible to play the game for the most part, a problem arises once you get to the volcano at the humanoid lizards (forgot their name). You have to go past the broken seal into the volcano at one point, and here you have a certain amount of time before everything blows up killing you. Problem is, you can't do it fast enough unless your lucky and have a slow computer :)
Use of moslo works with dark sun 2 and this will slow down your processor(moslo /20 dsun2.exe for instance), BUT you will not be able to load any saved games, at least not any games saved prior to using moslo. I think it's because the way both moslo and dsun works. DSUN just won't fint the stuff in its directory... Note that I've not tried saving a game while using moslo to load later on. Neither have I actually played through the volcano part using moslo, I just got fed up with having to play all the game through up to that point once again. I have however used other slow down programs, that got a bit of the way, i.e. I could get further in the timed part, but not all the way through, so there's a good chance moslo would cut it for you.

If you still have problems after this, just post here again and I'll check in to help out.

Might as well answer the thing about dual boot since asked for :)

To get this to work, you'll have to install win9x or DOS on the first partition, and install XP AFTERWARDS. Those other bastards would just erase the XP boot info. It might be possible to manage it all by use of LILO boot loader though. Not proficient enough to be certain if you could do so without actually installing a LINUX OS on one partition though. Also, earlier OSs often needed to be found at first GB of hard drive. Another very easy way to get multiboot functionality with minimum of fuss is if you have (or buy) a secondary IDE controller with on board BIOS (so you can boot from it). You don't even need to plug a disk into this device (ask if you buy it though to be certain it will work for the card you get), you'll just use it to choose disk to boot from. It does work with multiple disks, letting you boot from any of them, even slave disks. Not certain wether it could handle partitions as well but I do not see why not.

A Rahvenloft version is listed as "suspected to not work under XP" in second thread in forum... doesn't say it absolutely won't, but there seems to be problems all right...