Where'd my memory go?

Blitzkrieger

I've been trying to get some old games running lately but cos they're old DOS games they keep giving the message "not enough free extended memory". I'm pretty sure if they ran on my old 486 with 4MB ram they should run on my P3 with 256MB ram

Anybody know any tricks for running old games?

BattlingCheese

You could try here http://www.oldskool.org/pc/help/oldonnew/
or here
http://www.theunderdogs.org/tools/memory.pdf

Helped me even though I have 384Mb RAM. Damn those addictive nostalgic games. Ahh but it's worth it.

You might also need a slowdown utility as some games run a wee bit too quickly on modern machines. There's plenty out there and for the life of me I can't remember the name of the one I use.
Maybe after some coffee.

Wes

Kairo

http://www.hpaa.com/moslo/

That's a good slow down utility. Running old games can be difficult tho. Even with new PCs, the conventional memory stays the same and thats where it gives all the trouble.

po0k

What about the new 'pure 32-bit' OSes, like Win2k/Xp etc.?
I know you can get a DOS window for em, i wonder is it possible to emulate a whole DOS session with mem optimizers etc.?
Should be possible I reckon

nesf

Thats why I've hung onto my old 486 all these years... the original civilisation can still keep me up til the wee hours... I remember when I was young enough to be impressed by the intro graphics, back when a 386 was a luxury item for big buisness

po0k

yeah, and then you saw CIv2, and Dune2 and C&C, and TA, and one thing led to another..

i have a P100 and a P75 at home. Have to get the mobos working right first though.

also ahve a P200.
Its my quest to get some form of playable CS running on it.
Eirther though changing (hacking) the textures to lower res or some other means.

P200
48megs
3 hdds
voodoo1 4meg.

I finished the game on that with half the cpu speed. and 1/3 the ram. HL runs ( though I admit limps badly is a better expression of the fps) on it.

Kix

Heh SyxPak, nice to see it's alive

I managed to finish H/L on my P200/Voodoo Banshee and even enjoy it. Pretty similar config. Mind you, when you've seen better, it's hard to go backwards.

K

Praetorian

Id love to get my hands on some of the old games that i used to play. The ones that I do have, work perfectly on Windoze xp. The only problem for most is getting the dos sound emulation working. Ive a sound blaster live so there was no problem with sb16 emulation :P

Im looking for Wolfenstein, Rise of the triads, and a space shooter called Tyrian.

Can anyone help me with my retrogaming woes?

po0k

I too have a SBLive!
Can't get the sound to work.
FDeckin driver takes up a lot of ram
Does anyone remeber how to move everything but the essential .com s up into higher memory?
Its not like I'm short of it.
640Mb on my home machine, and 48 on the above.

Kix

SyxPak:

Use LOADHIGH before TSRs in your AUTOEXEC.BAT and DEVICEHIGH= instead of DEVICE= in your CONFIG.SYS.

There used to be a program in DOS which would set the more complex parameters on these lines to assign memory blocks, etc. but I can't remember what it was called. You should still get an improvement just using them as they are.

Oh, and remember to have HIMEM.SYS loaded at the top of the the CONFIG.SYS file.

K

eddhorse

the program that i think is the best for retro gaming is an aplication called MEMTURBO and can be found at wwww.memturbo.com , easy to use and works a treat