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HOW TO: Coax retro DOS games to play on Vista
Saturday, October 14th, 2006
Remember all those awesome games back in the pre Windows days? Space Quest, Commander 
Keen, Doom…no one had heard of Blizzard, and Sierra ruled supreme.
Of course, it wasn’t all sweetness and light. Those games could be quite finicky about the machines they played on, so many hours were devoted to tweaking those AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files, trying to load as much into HIMEM as possible, all in the interests of squeezing an extra 10KB out of that precious 640KB base memory.
I think the best I ever managed was every driver loaded with 632KB base memory left over. It was a good day.
And then Windows came along, just to complicate things. Luckily, Windows 3x wasn’t really an operating system, rather a collection of applications which sat on top of DOS. So to get around that we started writing long and complex AUTOEXEC scripts, with a boot/memory configuration to meet each and every need. Man, there was a LOT of rebooting those days. However the hardware wasn’t too complex, so the restarts were actually faster. Funny how things “develop”, isn’t it? APC Magazine » HOW TO: Coax retro DOS games to play on Vista
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