Gapporin's DOS Project; Or: You Can Go Back Home Again

[Gapporin]

I've never had any luck with vintage computers. When I was younger, I wanted a laptop that would solely run text editing as a word processor of sorts; it was less clunky than the actual processor. But oftentimes I came up short. Tandy "portable" "briefcase" laptop? DOA. An old 486 DOS laptop? Screen was broken so it only displayed one color: Inverse. My first TI-99? Dead, dead, dead. The only real luck I've had is with my Commodore 64, and I fear that one day, it too may decide to turn on me.

But after playing around with ScummVM on various portable handhelds, I wanted to do more than just run point-and-click adventures. There were a multitude of games I wanted to play again, and I needed something to play them on.

"Why DOS?" It's literally what I cut my teeth on. Looking back at the release dates of the some of my favorite games when I was younger, I was playing these when I was about 3-5 years old. Before I knew of Sega, Nintendo, or anything else video game related, I had DOS. I spent hours leafing through my dad's "DOS for Dummies" book, not really understanding what the book was saying, but staying interested by the pages just the same. I knew enough commands that I could run anything I wanted, but not enough to be dangerous or destructive. I know some of you will probably scoff at a young adult like myself engaging in nostalgia, but that's how I remember it.

Now, the astute might say among you, "Well, why doesn't he just use DOSBox?" And I did, for a little bit. I tested a version on my phone, but it wasn't even worth the effort (hope you enjoy your games running at a solid 5 fps). And I used it on my main computer as well, but something just didn't feel right. I don't know if I can explain it, but it just felt like using another emulator. I'd rather use the real hardware and setup than an emulator (unless they're portable), and besides, I was wanting a dedicated DOS machine anyways after I found out that some programs that I wanted to use were DOS-specific. So I set about purchasing my DOS machine.

THE BASICS

I wanted a laptop, first of all. I have no space to set up a computer tower (plus a large monitor) anywhere. I remember that from my first actual PC, a 333MHz compiled from various parts that my dad no longer needed after copious upgrading. While it ran Windows 98, it soon became my dedicated Winamp2 machine; there was nothing really else I could do with it. It wasn't Internet equipped or had a fancy video card. I played a round or two of You Don't Know Jack but that was about it. Eventually, my dad needed a part out of it or I got tired of the computer or something of the sort. Anyways, the tower was dismantled.

So, first specification was that it had to be a laptop. Second specification was that it had to be a 166MHz machine, as I would only use DOS on it and not load it up with a memory and/or CPU-intensive OS. I also figured that 166MHz would be fast enough to play any later-era DOS games that were a bit more resource heavy, but also slow enough to play any older DOS games as well without fear of being too fast (or so I thought). I also figured in the fact it was easier to slow down a fast computer to run older games than it was to try and squeeze performance out of a slower computer to run newer games.

The rest I didn't really care about. As long as it fit those two specifications (and it was a complete laptop and it was working), I was happy.

I pointed my web browser over to eBay.

"But, wait!" I can hear you say again. "Why don't you find something locally?" In my area, that's just not a plausible alternative. Thrifts never have any computers in stock, and I don't even know if they take them or not. The only place to buy a used computer is to go down to the flea market and see what they have in stock in their little stall(s). Even then, they only seem to stock XP or 2000 machines, which would be way too fast for my specifications. There might be an actual used computer store in town as well, but with my past experiences on those types of places, they charge exorbitantly for laptops in that spec range ($75-200). So eBay it is.

You wouldn't believe how many laptops are put up for sale that are gutted of any usefulness. I believe that the first three or four laptops I spotted had all of their hard drives taken out, or broken screen, or no battery or things like that. Pass.

But then I came across an IBM ThinkPad 380ED. 166Mhz Pentium MMX CPU, 3.1 GB HD, 80 MB of RAM, 20x CD-ROM drive (!!), floppy disks...the whole works. Battery was listed as "working, but not tested to full capacity". I knew what that meant. The price was reasonable, so I decided to wait it out. I actually have a funny-but-not-really story about the auction, so I'll just say that I ended up winning. Only $11 for the laptop (shipping was another story...). I paid for it, gave them the wrong address, frantically tried to send them the right address, and then they shipped it off. It was on its way.

Even though I've only had it for about a day or so (as of this writing), I can't believe how naive I was about picking it out. I didn't check to see if the drivers were easily obtainable (especially for an old dinosaur like DOS). I didn't see if the BIOS was easy to access or worked well with DOS. All I knew is that the specs were correct, so I assumed it would work.

POWER

The laptop was lacking a power supply, which I knew I would have to have, regardless if the battery worked or not. I found a brand new "slim" AC adapter that IBM redesigned for their earlier models on eBay as well, at a 1/3rd of the price that I would have paid for it through an online store. Score!

If I may digress here, it's positively ridiculous the prices that older computer parts go for these days. Yes, I know that they're getting harder and harder to find, but I really shouldn't have to pay in the triple digits for a single battery. Even on eBay, the cheapest battery I could find for my model was $50, which is still way too much for a DOS laptop. Therefore, I'm not getting a replacement. I figure that I can't think of any place that I'll need to use it without power; even the campus lounge area has wall sockets. Besides, with the "slim" AC adapter, it's portable enough already.

GETTING STARTED

The laptop arrived. Having already received the power supply the day before, I plugged the laptop in and turned it on. Soon, I was greeted with an error message: Error 00161 and Error 00163. Uh oh, I thought, this one's a dud, too. I downloaded the hardware manual from the Internet, and checked what it said about error messages. Turns out they were actually pretty simple errors. Error 161 meant that the backup battery was dead. The backup battery (not the main power battery) was a CR1220 lithium battery located on the back on the laptop. After making a run out to Wal-Mart, I obtained a new 1220 and replaced the old one out. Error 163 meant that the date and time were not set up correctly (the laptop asks you to set it up anyways when you first boot the computer). After a fresh battery change and correct date setup, I was greeted with a new error message:

"Error reading system disk
Abort, Retry, Fail?"

This, however, was an error I was actually happy to see. This meant that the computer had booted up successfully and that the hard drive was an clean slate, ready to be used. To make doubly sure, I inserted a bootable Killdisk floppy and reset the computer. Killdisk claims that it has several different methods of completely destroying data on a hard drive, some as effective as the US Department of Defense standards. The free version, however, only came with one mode: It turns every bit on the hard drive to a 0. I figured that was good enough for me.

After Killdisk was done formatting the drive, I reset the computer again and entered MS-DOS 6.22 Disk 1 (Ah, if only OS's were smaller than 5 MB nowadays). After installing MS-DOS, I was greeted by the MS-DOS start screen. Installation successful.

DRIVERS

Like I said before, I acted a bit too naively about the whole process. I assumed that I could just put DOS on the computer, put some games on it and be done. I still could probably do that -- but nothing would work right. No sound, wrong graphics, sluggish performance, etc. It just so happened that after I installed DOS, I entered the BIOS for the computer. After poking around a bit, I came across an info box that had the BIOS version number on it, plus other version numbers for different routines that controlled different parts of the computer. Ever curious, I wondered if there was an updated version of the BIOS somewhere. I headed over to IBM's website.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I completely lucked out. IBM--er, I mean, Lenovo keeps an abundant supply of drivers, manuals and other information for their legacy products. They even have support for OS/2 drivers still available to download (which makes sense considering it was their OS). I soon came across this driver matrix that sorted everything I needed to download in an easy format. Score.

After downloading them, I realized that the drivers were too large to fit on a single floppy, but too small to use a whole CD for. I find it funny that developers around the DOS era didn't give a second thought to using CD's with only 5-10 MB of data on them, but we today consider it wasteful if a CD doesn't have at least 200-300 MB worth of data on it. So I transported the drivers from my main computer to my DOS computer. Each driver's installation program had to run from its own floppy as well. So here's how the process went:

Copy Driver 1 and Driver 2 from main PC hard drive to disk.
Copy drivers from disk to DOS computer.
Run driver 1 from DOS Hard drive.
Re-write floppy for unpacked driver 1.
Run Driver 1 installation from floppy.
Restart computer (if needed)
Run driver 2 from DOS Hard drive.
Re-write floppy for unpacked driver 2.
Run driver 2 installation from floppy.

...and on and on and on. Fortunately I only had about eight or nine to run on the computer. So I did that and installed all the drivers unto the computer.

After the drivers, I had to add a few more things. I was a disciple of the MS-DOS Shell, but it wasn't included in MS-DOS 6.22 due to the fact that by that time, people were migrating over to Windows 95, which already had its built in shell. Fortunately for me, a MS-DOS 6.22 Supplemental Disk was created, which adds older features such as the DOS Shell, plus others that were available in DOS 5 but snipped from the newer 6 version. I tracked down a copy of that (would you believe you can download it from Microsoft themselves?), installed it, and re-iterated myself with the DOS Shell.

For those not familiar with the DOS Shell, think of it as a very simple, crude version of Windows Explorer. You have your drives and folder tree on one side, a list of files contained in said folder on another file, and a list of options that you can do with that file. You can run files directly from the DOS Shell, or edit text files in the text editor, and so on and so forth.

Another driver I had to track down was mouse.com. I have an external mouse connected to a USB-to-PS/2 dongle which is then connected into the DOS machine (I have an intense dislike for laptop mice devices, plus the laptop mouse wouldn't work under DOS anyways). To use PS/2 mice, you need a copy of mouse.com. Unfortunately, mouse.com is only included within PC-DOS 7. PC-DOS was the successor to MS-DOS, the "half DOS" that was integrated into Windows 95. You had to find a local copy of the file, copy onto a disk and then copy the file into your DOS folder. You also had to load the driver into high memory using the AUTOEXEC.BAT file.

So after straightening that out, I rebooted the computer and ran DOS Shell. "DOS Shell could not be run, retry?" This puzzled me, as it always worked before. So I retried. Same message. Retry. Same message. I quit, and then tried to edit AUTOEXEC.BAT to see if something was screwy. "Out of memory" was the answer DOS gave me. Out of memory!? With 80 MB of RAM? It was then I learned about DOS's split of conventional memory, upper memory and extended memory. I ran the MEM program, and it helpfully showed that all the drivers I just installed sucked up my conventional memory dry, leaving me with only about 200K left. This was not good. So I rebooted, and then processed the AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files line by line. After taking out the Infrared and PC-Card drivers (stuff I probably would never have a use for anyways), I was left with a more suitable 500K of free conventional memory, and could load programs and text files once more.

GAMES

Power: check. DOS: check. Drivers: check. Bring on the games! I already had a few compilations at my disposal, so I unzipped what I wanted to its own directory, then burnt all the directories to a CD disc. Taking the disc over to my DOS machine, I inserted it and used XCOPY /S to copy everything over to the DOS machine (XCOPY /S was basically telling DOS that every folder and subfolder on the disc should be copied over to the hard drive). After that finished, my first order was to try out Tyrian.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm an extreme fanboy for Tyrian. But more than that, Tyrian makes an excellent benchmark program for testing out a DOS machine. Firstly, the game uses FM music so you can see if your card supports that. Secondly, the game uses extra detailed graphics if you have a Pentium or above. Thirdly, there's always action on screen, so you can see if your computer can handle the gameplay or if it becomes choppy or sluggish. Fourthly, Tyrian is freeware. Fifthly, it's a heckuva game to boot.

I was worried at first that my computer wouldn't have a sound card as I didn't see it mentioned anywhere in the auction. However, when running Tyrian's setup, the music worked perfectly. Turns out, when I read the manual for the computer from IBM--I mean, Lenovo's website, the computer comes with a Soundblaster Pro card inside. Score!

I booted up Tyrian and everything played perfectly. Smooth graphics, great sound, simply perfect. I played a few rounds before I realized it was 3:30 AM, and I spent the last 6 hours setting up my computer. I headed to bed.

LOOKING AHEAD...

Well, that could be the end of the story, right? Guy gets computer, guy plays on computer, guy ends up happy. However, something else crossed my mind while I was playing Tyrian...

Back in the day, I used a Microsoft Sidewinder Gamepad. These were the best gamepads ever (at least, I thought so) and I realized that I needed one for my computer. After doing some more Internet studying (it never ends), I quickly realized two things:

1. The Sidewinder doesn't work in DOS.
2. I have no gameport.

First one's easy. The Sidewinder was only meant to be used in Windows 95 or above. Oh, sure, you can use it in DOS, but only that PC-DOS subsidiary that I mentioned earlier (and only half the buttons work). I guess my memories blurred enough together that I thought you could use the pad under DOS. I haven't decided what I want to use instead, but I've been familiar with the Gravis Joystick from olden days as well. Thing is, I don't like using a joystick for gaming at all (I make exceptions for arcade games), and I certainly don't want it for PC gaming. I think I might try and find a Gravis Gamepad (the SNES controller lookalike, not the PSX controller lookalike) but like I said, I haven't quite decided yet.

Second option's a bit trickier. After reading the manual, I realized that I had no gameport on this laptop. All was not lost, however. I could shell out some money for a Port Replicator (boy, doesn't that sound futuristic?) which added more ports to your laptop. The Enhanced Port Replicator (aka the top-of-the-line port replicator) adds an external monitor port, audio line-in and audio line-out, a serial port, MIDI/gameport, mouse and keyboard ports, single USB port, a security system lock and two PCMCIA slots. Searching on eBay, these seem to run about $10-15 before shipping, so I'll probably take the plunge and grab one for my computer.

CONCLUSION

So here's the stats (not including shipping):
Laptop - $11
AC Adapter - $10
Port Replicator - $10
Gamepad - $5-10

Did I overpay? Probably. It would ultimately cheaper to have a PC tower and build your own parts from the ground up, I think. Was it worth it? Definitely. There's just something about the whole experience that DOSBox can't provide, and I probably would have paid at least twice as much if I had to. Yes, there was some hassle along the way, and yes, there was a lot of learning and reading to do, but that just makes it all the more worthwhile.

Now if you'll excuse me, I do believe another round of Catacomb is in order...

[Flack]

Wow, I loved reading this! That was a fantastic post, and kudos to you for going back and exploring.

People have a hard time shifting back and finding appropriate hardware for DOS gaming. When buying an old machine, it's easy to "overbuy." A P166 with a 3 gig hard drive is a fairly stout machine for DOS. Put it this way, when I started Best Buy in 1994 we didn't have a single Pentium machine for sale, and even by the time I left in 1995 the fastest machine we had was a P133 -- plus we still had 486 machines for sale. A P166 is faster than any dedicated DOS machine I ever owned back in the day. Likewise on the drive space. Old computer guys love to compare old hard drive prices (I am no different) and while I was working at Best Buy I remember our first 1 gig drive coming in. Retail price was $999 but with my employee discount I got it for $599 + tax. At the time I remember thinking I could probably put every program I owned on that drive.

Configuring memory ... ah yes, one of the great lost arts. As the Best Buy computer tech, I did this for customers on a regular basis. You said you got your machine with around 500k of conventional memory. Our goal back in the day was to start off with 600k or better free. Remember, this is dealing with a pool of 640k. There were a lot of old tricks you could use to get this much free. I used to use a program called Helix Cloaking that would allow you to load drivers into upper memory and then it would just load a 1k driver into conventional memory to reference the other driver. Another thing a lot of people did was run Microsoft's "memmaker" command (it's built in to DOS) but that was always considered the baby's way to do it, and more often than not it led to problems because Microsoft's methods of memory management were backwards from everyone else's, so if you used your own configuration and ran memmaker chances are you would just be making things worse. Just to give you an idea about conventional memory, I remember a lot of people buying Sim City for DOS around that time. Sim City required 588k of conventional memory. People would come in to the store with the game and their tower (!) and ask me to install it. To be honest usually what I would do is install a pirated copy of Helix Cloaking to manage their memory and be done with it. E-Mail me and I'll dig out my old copy if you want it.

DOS Shell is for pussies. There, that's covered.

When I go back and deal with old hardware, I am always amazed at how much we take for granted. USB, for one -- MAN, how we lived without that I'll never know. I didn't get my first CD-Rom drive until 95 or 96 I think, and I had no other computers to network things to. Everything that went on or came off of my computer did so either via floppy or phone line.

One not very well known DOS command is SUBST. SUBST allows you to substitute one drove for another. This was typically used to fool DOS into thinking you were running something from a floppy drive, when you were not. A lot of game installers were hard coded to only run from an A: drive. If you unzip a disk into a directory (let's say c:\temp) and you want DOS to think it's a floppy drive, type "SUBST A: C:\TEMP" (without the quotes). Then when you go to A: you will really be in c:\temp. Then you can run your install files without having to really put them on a floppy. When you are done change back to c: and type SUBST A: /D and it'll delete the sub.

Drop me an e-mail and I'll dig out some useful files and utilities for you. I also have a boxed Gravis Gamepad sitting here, collecting dust ...

[Big Papa Husker]

Great post! It was fun reading it.

Flack - I had no idea about that you could sub directories in for drives. That would have made things so much easier back in the day installing multi-disk games.

[Jorpho]

Eh. If you don't already think that it's more trouble than it's worth, your opinion may change soon enough.

Anyway, you can make the Sidewinder work in DOS. Get SDWRGMPD from here.

And rather than "mouse.com", you may be much better off with Ctmouse ("Cutemouse"), a very tiny DOS mouse driver. (It's actually part of the FreeDOS project, I think.)

There are in fact a good many DOS utilities that have emerged in recent years, both independently and as part of the FreeDOS project. You might want to look into them, since, as Flack says, 500k won't get you very far. http://www.mdgx.com is the place to go, although the site's layout can be pretty confusing. Old utilities like Cloaking and QEMM386 are also out there. (Technically, they're not freeware, but the companies associated with them seem to be quite indifferent.)

[Flack]

Great post! It was fun reading it.

Flack - I had no idea about that you could sub directories in for drives. That would have made things so much easier back in the day installing multi-disk games.

Amen. I specifically remember many old Sierra games demanded to be installed from an A: drive. Especially when installing downloaded games, it was a pain to have to dump them all to real floppies to then install from.

[boatofcar]

Great read, Gapp. I choose to relive all my DOS memories vicariously through posts like yours

[Gapporin]

People have a hard time shifting back and finding appropriate hardware for DOS gaming...A P166 is faster than any dedicated DOS machine I ever owned back in the day. Likewise on the drive space.

In all actuality, the computer was actually designed for Windows 95 (it says so right on the sticker at the bottom), and that's what it came bundled with originally. However, I haven't ran into too many problems of "overdoing" it yet; just one game I've tested so far has been "unthrottled". Even when I tried to run a CD, it lagged and stuttered -- although, that's probably more of a memory issue. And like I stated before, it's easier to slow down than to speed up.

I used to use a program called Helix Cloaking that would allow you to load drivers into upper memory and then it would just load a 1k driver into conventional memory to reference the other driver.

Haha, nice! Sounds like I need that program.

Another thing a lot of people did was run Microsoft's "memmaker" command (it's built in to DOS) but that was always considered the baby's way to do it, and more often than not it led to problems because Microsoft's methods of memory management were backwards from everyone else's, so if you used your own configuration and ran memmaker chances are you would just be making things worse.

I can attest to that. After setting up the computer with 500K of conventional memory left, I found out that even though I could run simpler programs and games, some games needed a lot more memory to run. I remembered that DOS had a "memmaker" program, so I ran it and had it set up my auto/config. When the process finished, I had 616K free! Wow! However, in the process, it broke everything. Some games refused to run, and games that did work now crashed and reset the computer. Needless to say, I reactivated my old auto/config files.

E-Mail me and I'll dig out my old copy if you want it.

Will do.

DOS Shell is for pussies. There, that's covered.

To be honest, all the simple commands I use straight from the prompt. But I'm a visual person; I like seeing everything neat and organized so I know what each folder contains. Especially if I'm looking for a certain file; it's a nightmare trying to use dir or dir /w and then scan each column to see if it's actually there.

I imagine the more and more I use DOS, the less and less I'll wean myself away from DOS Shell. But for now, I use it, even if it does make me an undesirable.

When I go back and deal with old hardware, I am always amazed at how much we take for granted. USB, for one -- MAN, how we lived without that I'll never know.

No kidding. All of my USB ports on my main computer are pretty much all used up at any given time.

One not very well known DOS command is SUBST. SUBST allows you to substitute one drove for another. This was typically used to fool DOS into thinking you were running something from a floppy drive, when you were not. A lot of game installers were hard coded to only run from an A: drive. If you unzip a disk into a directory (let's say c:\temp) and you want DOS to think it's a floppy drive, type "SUBST A: C:\TEMP" (without the quotes). Then when you go to A: you will really be in c:\temp. Then you can run your install files without having to really put them on a floppy. When you are done change back to c: and type SUBST A: /D and it'll delete the sub.

Cool, I'll keep that in mind. Re-writing the floppy for every driver wasn't that difficult but it was time-consuming.

Eh. If you don't already think that it's more trouble than it's worth, your opinion may change soon enough.

It has been frustrating in some parts, no doubt. But I've actually been enjoying learning and messing around with the OS. I'm a bit of a masochist that way.

Anyway, you can make the Sidewinder work in DOS. Get SDWRGMPD from here.

Awesome, I didn't even know that existed! Thanks!

And rather than "mouse.com", you may be much better off with Ctmouse ("Cutemouse"), a very tiny DOS mouse driver. (It's actually part of the FreeDOS project, I think.)

Cool, I'll look into that.

I just ordered the Port Replicator, some 3.5" floppies (double sided!) and a Sidewinder Pad as well, so I'm planning to expand the functionality of this computer a bit. I also have a theory on how to use the expanded USB port, but I guess I'll have to wait and see...

[Jorpho]

Wait, you can really add a USB port that easily!? Sounds much too good to be true.

But if that is indeed the case, you just might be able to access (though not necessarily boot from) a standard USB thumbdrive from the DOS prompt, which will save you the agony of shuffling floppies around. (Nostalgia loses all meaning in the face of having to juggle dozens of potentially-failing floppies.) I'm actually not too sure what the best way to do it is, but the Wakepup boot floppy has everything neatly set up already.

Another project I've been meaning to tend to for a while is using a combination of MemDisk and IsoLinux to make a bootable CD that can magically act like a bunch of different boot floppies. SystemRescueCD uses this technique already.

[James8BitStar]

First one's easy. The Sidewinder was only meant to be used in Windows 95 or above. Oh, sure, you can use it in DOS, but only that PC-DOS subsidiary that I mentioned earlier (and only half the buttons work).

This guy made a DOS driver for the Sidewinder. Never having owned one myself I can't say how well it works, so let me know, all right?

(Incidentally he also made Slowdown, the BEST ever utility for slowing down your PC)

In regards to your post... Dude, good for you! Seriously.

Years ago my main gaming PC broke. Actually, the hard drive went bad, but we decided the whole computer was busted (my family is a bunch of pessimists and they suck). I bought a laptop thinking it would be an exact replica of my desktop PC, but ran into a plethoria of problems--among them, the sound card was some shitty off-brand.

I wish I had gotten a laptop like yours that had a built-in Soundblaster Pro. I wonder how many laptops were made that had one?

[Pantechnicon]

This is good info. One of my back-burner projects is to build a pure DOS-based machine dedicated to running some of my old Dynamix flight sims: Red Baron, Aces Over Europe, etc. Luckily the thrifts around here are well stocked enough that I can probably find a decent Pentium 133 or so for under $20.

[Ze_ro]

it had to be a 166MHz machine, as I would only use DOS on it and not load it up with a memory and/or CPU-intensive OS. I also figured that 166MHz would be fast enough to play any later-era DOS games that were a bit more resource heavy, but also slow enough to play any older DOS games as well without fear of being too fast (or so I thought).

For what it's worth, my "Pure DOS" machine is a Pentium 133, and it runs everything at full speed. Just thought it might be worth throwing numbers out to anyone else who's reading and thinking of building a DOS machine themselves.

As for slowing it down, you probably would have had to do that even if you had bought a 486. DOS games weren't good at compensating for processor speed.

But then I came across an IBM ThinkPad 380ED. 166Mhz Pentium MMX CPU, 3.1 GB HD, 80 MB of RAM, 20x CD-ROM drive (!!), floppy disks...the whole works. Battery was listed as "working, but not tested to full capacity". I knew what that meant.

Batteries are going to be a big problem with any older laptop. They really don't age well, and you certainly won't be able to get full (any?) capacity out of one that's been well-used.

FYI, I don't think DOS can access that much RAM... I think I have 64MB in my machine, but EMM386 only uses half of that.

I can't believe how naive I was about picking it out. I didn't check to see if the drivers were easily obtainable (especially for an old dinosaur like DOS). I didn't see if the BIOS was easy to access or worked well with DOS. All I knew is that the specs were correct, so I assumed it would work.

Actually, you lucked out with getting an IBM. These were pretty popular in the days, so even being a Win 95 machine, DOS shouldn't have much trouble. The main problem I find with DOS drivers are for sound cards... Most games only support a small number of cards, and if yours isn't on the list, you're sometimes SOL. I've found the SoundBlaster 16 to be a good mid-range card that almost every game seems to work with.

If I may digress here, it's positively ridiculous the prices that older computer parts go for these days. Yes, I know that they're getting harder and harder to find, but I really shouldn't have to pay in the triple digits for a single battery.

Sadly, that's par for the course with laptops. Desktop computers and ISA cards are dirt cheap, but laptops retain their value much better. And batteries... well... you might be able to find shops that can rebuild batteries, as long as you can provide an existing one to house it. Probably more effective than buying another used one that likely only holds 2% of it's charge.

After downloading them, I realized that the drivers were too large to fit on a single floppy, but too small to use a whole CD for. I find it funny that developers around the DOS era didn't give a second thought to using CD's with only 5-10 MB of data on them, but we today consider it wasteful if a CD doesn't have at least 200-300 MB worth of data on it.

This is one thing I still find frustrating when trying to put games on my DOS machine... I hate wasting CD's, but splitting things into 5 parts to put on disks is crappy too. For a while, I was trying to get a system of Zip disks working, but all the drives/disks I found either had click death or required power supplies that I had a hard time finding. If I could manage to find a way to read SD or CF on the DOS machine that didn't require all kinds of PCMCIA crap, it would be nice (I actually have the hardware, PCMCIA slots connected to an ISA controller card, but it's so messy that I stick with CD's instead).

Fortunately for me, a MS-DOS 6.22 Supplemental Disk was created, which adds older features such as the DOS Shell, plus others that were available in DOS 5 but snipped from the newer 6 version. I tracked down a copy of that (would you believe you can download it from Microsoft themselves?), installed it, and re-iterated myself with the DOS Shell.

I was always frustrated by this too... they took out some pretty useful stuff! Good to see you found the Extras disk though. I used to use DOSShell all the time when I was younger, though it doesn't seem as useful to me anymore. Perhaps modern GUI's have spoiled me.

I was left with a more suitable 500K of free conventional memory, and could load programs and text files once more.

As others have mentioned, managing your memory is an important part of getting DOS working well, and 500k isn't enough. The real trick I've found is seeing how much memory drivers use, and just LH'ing them into high memory... except you probably won't be able to stick them ALL in there, so you have to try to pack upper memory efficiently. For example, if you have 21k upper memory free, and your CD-ROM driver needs 24k, then you might want to move that mouse driver out of upper memory so the CD driver can fit.

Try using QEMM. It's more efficient than EMM386 is, and their version of memmaker works better. However, QEMM isn't as compatible. Because of this, I've set up my autoexec.bat and config.sys with a menu system that lets me choose what memory manager to start with (with an option of NO memory manager, so I can play that bitch Ultima VII). Here's a link that shows how to make these menus. This might also help with memory management, as you can test new setups without losing the old ones.

Also, use CuteMouse instead of the DOS's driver, and use SHSUCDX instead of MSCDEX for running your CD-ROM drive. You'll save memory, and they seem to work at least as well as MS's versions from what I've seen. While I'm talking about drivers, if you're not used to 8.3 filenames, you might want to look into LFNDOS, which lets you use long file names in DOS. I remember it having some issues, but at least you won't get all those tildes.

I haven't decided what I want to use instead, but I've been familiar with the Gravis Joystick from olden days as well. Thing is, I don't like using a joystick for gaming at all (I make exceptions for arcade games), and I certainly don't want it for PC gaming. I think I might try and find a Gravis Gamepad (the SNES controller lookalike, not the PSX controller lookalike) but like I said, I haven't quite decided yet.

Honestly, the Gravis gamepads are pretty crappy. I used to use one back in the days, but it was basically because the only other options were awful analog controllers with trimmer pots and such. The Gravis in no way compares to modern gamepads. I have one hooked up to my machine right now for shits and giggles, but I generally prefer to use the keyboard instead.

Let me know if you get that Sidewinder working, as I have one sitting around that I wouldn't mind using instead of the Gravis.

Now if you'll excuse me, I do believe another round of Catacomb is in order...

Excellent game by the way. It's good to hear that I'm not the only person on the internet who still enjoys it.

Wait, you can really add a USB port that easily!? Sounds much too good to be true.

The fun will come when he tries to use it in DOS. Sadly, USB and DOS do not get along well together... I've tried.

--Zero

[Jorpho]

The fun will come when he tries to use it in DOS. Sadly, USB and DOS do not get along well together... I've tried.

I was kind of skeptical too, until I found that Wakepup disc. But certainly, I wouldn't expect a USB printer, joypad, or mouse to do anything. What exactly did you try?

Actually, that reminds me: a direct serial connection might be useful for transferring files too; there's even an MS-DOS utility to make it easier, in theory, though I can't quite remember what it's called right now. Anyway, I never had much luck with that either; serial ports can be finnicky things.

[Gapporin]

I s'pose I should update my situation. After doing a bit of poking around, I realized I needed an upper memory manager. After reading about the various types, most people suggested QEMM. I found a website that has QEMM for download and even a short tutorial included, which I followed. Amazingly, it freed up enough memory so that only 6-7K of conventional memory! Unfortunately, like a dolt, I had my mouse driver remarked out when running the tutorial, so QEMM never factored it in to its setup. After putting it back in, I re-ran QEMM's OPTIMIZE program, and it successfully added to into the queue. Or so I thought. Now, when using either the built in DOS or Ctmouse driver, sometimes the driver doesn't load up the mouse correctly, instead preferring to assign it to COM1. This not only makes the mouse not work, it makes the keyboard unusable as well, so then I have to reboot and then the driver will load it up again correctly. This could either be one of three things:

1. The driver(s) doesn't like my USB mouse (I'm using a USB-to-PS/2 converter at the moment)
2. QEMM doesn't like the mouse drivers
3. I fouled something up and enabled the driver incorrectly.

With Ctmouse, I even forced the driver to run with PS/2 (/P), but no go. I'd say about 1 out of 4 times, the driver fails to load the mouse correctly. But at the moment, I now have 633K of conventional memory free.

This guy made a DOS driver for the Sidewinder. Never having owned one myself I can't say how well it works, so let me know, all right?

(Incidentally he also made Slowdown, the BEST ever utility for slowing down your PC)

Jorpho already mentioned the Sidewinder driver, but I must thank you for mentioning Slowdown. I was using Mo'Slo to try and slow down certain programs, but they hung before loading. Slowdown, however, works great and I can change settings on the fly. I have it currently loaded as a TSR, but that may change as I muck around with the settings.

Batteries are going to be a big problem with any older laptop. They really don't age well, and you certainly won't be able to get full (any?) capacity out of one that's been well-used.

Nah, this battery's pretty much shot. QEMM's Manifest reports that it has an 80% charge left, but the laptop won't boot at all without the power supply plugged in. I wish I could use the computer without a battery inserted as it makes faint sound almost like a buzzsaw, but I'm thinking that running a laptop without a battery is not a good option (feel free to correct me if I am wrong).

FYI, I don't think DOS can access that much RAM... I think I have 64MB in my machine, but EMM386 only uses half of that.

Yeah, you're right. According to the BIOS, I have about 81xxxK installed. According to Manifest and DOS itself, it tops out at 65535K. I assume this was a restriction within DOS itself.

Actually, you lucked out with getting an IBM. These were pretty popular in the days, so even being a Win 95 machine, DOS shouldn't have much trouble. The main problem I find with DOS drivers are for sound cards...

Actually, I found out that even if no drivers are installed, some games can still use the soundcard. In fact, the only "driver" I have installed pertaining to sound is actually a mixer that allows me to boost the volume so that I don't have to crank the physical volume dial on the laptop all the way up.

Try using QEMM. It's more efficient than EMM386 is, and their version of memmaker works better. However, QEMM isn't as compatible. Because of this, I've set up my autoexec.bat and config.sys with a menu system that lets me choose what memory manager to start with (with an option of NO memory manager, so I can play that bitch Ultima VII). Here's a link that shows how to make these menus. This might also help with memory management, as you can test new setups without losing the old ones.

Also, use CuteMouse instead of the DOS's driver, and use SHSUCDX instead of MSCDEX for running your CD-ROM drive. You'll save memory, and they seem to work at least as well as MS's versions from what I've seen. While I'm talking about drivers, if you're not used to 8.3 filenames, you might want to look into LFNDOS, which lets you use long file names in DOS. I remember it having some issues, but at least you won't get all those tildes.

Thanks for the tips. I've just installed SHSUCDX at that seemed to free up a little bit more memory, so I'll keep it around.

Excellent game by the way. It's good to hear that I'm not the only person on the internet who still enjoys it.

It's kind of funny, actually, that the game has more than a passing resemblance to Gauntlet. However, to me this was even before I knew of Gauntlet, and me and my brother both thought it was a kickin' game (which it still is).

The fun will come when he tries to use it in DOS. Sadly, USB and DOS do not get along well together... I've tried.

What I wanted to test out on the USB port was a pair of USB-powered speakers that I have. The only thing the speakers use from USB is the power, and the input plugs into the headphone jack, so it doesn't actually "use" anything from the computer itself, and there's certainly no drivers needed to make them work. There's always a chance that DOS can't read the USB port at all, but it was just something I wanted to try out.

I was kind of skeptical too, until I found that Wakepup disc. But certainly, I wouldn't expect a USB printer, joypad, or mouse to do anything. What exactly did you try?

I've seen USB mouse drivers for DOS, but the documentation that came with them said that they were extremely cumbersome and had dissappointing results when used with games or the like. Like I said above, I really wasn't planning on using anything crucial with the USB port anyways.

[Flack]

Soundblaster was to soundcards what Hayes was to modems. One of my dad's favorite computer jokes used to be, "there are two kinds of modems: Hayes, and Hayes compatible." Same goes for Soundblaster cards. Soundblaster was the de facto PC soundcard for years and I think every game I ever saw was compatible with it. The other good news is, at least as far as DOS era Soundblasters are concerned, they're all backwards compatible.

[NoahsMyBro]

Wow, that brought back tons of memories. I used to be a wiz with DOS, and now probably forgot it all.

I do recall that I used a program called XTree Gold to navigate the file system. Sounds to me like DOS Shell was the same sort of thing. If you haven't yet tried Xtree, I highly recommend it.

Also, my first PC was a 486/40, and my first PC game was Wing Commander. WC was unplayable (too fast) on the 486/40. I think mo'slow was what I used, but I'm not sure. I do recall that I launched whatever slowdown program I was using by entering the name of the slowdown program, and following it with two arguments - one was the name of the program I wanted to run, and the other was the percentage of 'real' CPU speed I wanted to run at. SO, If I wanted to run Wing Commander at 4mhz instead of 40mhz, I'd enter "moslow wc 10", or something like that.

Thanks for the cool story.

[Jorpho]

One of the most important utilities at the aforementioned MDGX.com is UMBPCI, which basically uses hardware-dependent methods to allow the use of upper memory without having to use EMM386 (or QEMM). This means that it's even compatible with Ultima VII! You should take a look.

[Ze_ro]

I wouldn't expect a USB printer, joypad, or mouse to do anything. What exactly did you try?

It was quite some time ago, but I think I was trying to use a USB SD card reader. The drivers I found were supposed to handle mass storage devices, but were only tested with hard drives and CD-ROM's (the author made the drivers primarily for using Ghost, which was only available for DOS at the time). I never managed to get it to read anything from the card.

One of the huge problems with USB, is that it requires a fairly significant amount of CPU control. With modern computers, that's not a big problem, but for older DOS computers, you end up with large drivers that chew up a lot of memory. I would generally try to avoid any USB devices that you can find alternatives for (ie, PS/2 or serial mice, AT keyboards, parallel printers, etc).

Actually, that reminds me: a direct serial connection might be useful for transferring files too; there's even an MS-DOS utility to make it easier, in theory, though I can't quite remember what it's called right now. Anyway, I never had much luck with that either; serial ports can be finnicky things.

I remember using a program called "LapLink" to do this a long, long time ago. It used the parallel port rather than serial. I've never really dug much farther into it, but I'm sure there are other alternatives too.

With Ctmouse, I even forced the driver to run with PS/2 (/P), but no go. I'd say about 1 out of 4 times, the driver fails to load the mouse correctly. But at the moment, I now have 633K of conventional memory free.

Did either driver work properly before installing QEMM? Are you trying to load it after bootup, or from the autoexec? Maybe your mouse is conflicting somehow with the built-in mouse? I've used cutemouse with QEMM plenty of times without problems, though with a serial mouse. My only suggestion would be to look for some backup config\autoexec files that QEMM should have made before it changed them, enable the mouse driver, and then try QEMM's memmaker again.

Yeah, you're right. According to the BIOS, I have about 81xxxK installed. According to Manifest and DOS itself, it tops out at 65535K. I assume this was a restriction within DOS itself.

Not really a big problem, as you'll be hard-pressed to find any DOS program that would even come close to using that much memory anyways.

Actually, I found out that even if no drivers are installed, some games can still use the soundcard. In fact, the only "driver" I have installed pertaining to sound is actually a mixer that allows me to boost the volume so that I don't have to crank the physical volume dial on the laptop all the way up.

I guess I worded things wrong... but with sound cards, pretty much every program drives them directly without any driver... hence why you have to tell every game the IRQ, I/O address, DMA, etc. I have some sort of sound blaster drivers running too, but I'm not entirely sure what they do.

What I wanted to test out on the USB port was a pair of USB-powered speakers that I have. The only thing the speakers use from USB is the power, and the input plugs into the headphone jack, so it doesn't actually "use" anything from the computer itself, and there's certainly no drivers needed to make them work. There's always a chance that DOS can't read the USB port at all, but it was just something I wanted to try out.

If all they do is draw power from the port, then you may not need any USB drivers at all... However, I seem to recall that the USB protocol has some method of having devices request certain power levels or something, so maybe it won't. I guess try it out and see what happens!

Soundblaster was to soundcards what Hayes was to modems. One of my dad's favorite computer jokes used to be, "there are two kinds of modems: Hayes, and Hayes compatible." Same goes for Soundblaster cards. Soundblaster was the de facto PC soundcard for years and I think every game I ever saw was compatible with it. The other good news is, at least as far as DOS era Soundblasters are concerned, they're all backwards compatible.

There are a lot of older games that came out before Creative really made a name for themselves... in these cases, telling the game you have an AdLib sound card usually works, as the original Sound Blasters were basically just cloned AdLib cards with a bunch of extra features.

I seem to recall there were some compatibility problems with later Sound Blaster cards like the AWE32, but I was never too sure what the issues were, as I didn't have one of those cards myself.

I have a Gravis Ultrasound kicking around somewhere that I'd like to test out some day. I also have a "Disney Sound Source", which is basically a speaker with a D-to-A converter that hooks to a parallel port. I've never once used it, and I can only assume the sound quality is poor. I've heard that the Roland MT-32 is an excellent card (especially for Sierra and LucasArts adventure games), and I'd love to find one some day. Unfortunately, not all games supported cards like the MT32 and GUS, so you either had to use some software compatibility layer, or just do without.

--Zero

[Jorpho]

I guess I worded things wrong... but with sound cards, pretty much every program drives them directly without any driver... hence why you have to tell every game the IRQ, I/O address, DMA, etc. I have some sort of sound blaster drivers running too, but I'm not entirely sure what they do.

The SB16, at least, sometimes used CTMM.SYS (or something like that), which was necessary for certain features such as VOC playback.

[Flack]

Both the GUS and the Roland were awesome sound cards with great quality, but they didn't have support like the SB cards did. I actually bought an AWE32 at Comdex in 1997 but I don't remember having major issues with it. In fact for most older games you could just select SB16 and it would work.

I thought I remember reading that SoundBlaster cards were the same as Adlib cards but with more voices added to handle digital speech but that may have just been a rumor at the time.

[Gapporin]

I think mo'slow was what I used, but I'm not sure. I do recall that I launched whatever slowdown program I was using by entering the name of the slowdown program, and following it with two arguments - one was the name of the program I wanted to run, and the other was the percentage of 'real' CPU speed I wanted to run at. SO, If I wanted to run Wing Commander at 4mhz instead of 40mhz, I'd enter "moslow wc 10", or something like that.

Yeah, that's MoSlo alright. To use it, you would type in "moslo /[s1,s2] (MoSlo had two different methods of slowing down processor speed) /10 <path of game>. But for my money, the aforementioned SLOWDOWN is a better utility. All you need to do is hit the keystroke Ctrl+Alt+<n>, where n is the number/speed you wish to slowdown the processor to. So, if you want 10% speed, all you need to do is hit Ctrl+Alt+1. And since SLOWDOWN is a TSR, you can use this function anytime you like. Very handy.

Did either driver work properly before installing QEMM? Are you trying to load it after bootup, or from the autoexec? Maybe your mouse is conflicting somehow with the built-in mouse? I've used cutemouse with QEMM plenty of times without problems, though with a serial mouse. My only suggestion would be to look for some backup config\autoexec files that QEMM should have made before it changed them, enable the mouse driver, and then try QEMM's memmaker again.

Yeah, they both did, and I was loading them up in autoexec. That's a good idea about the mouse confliction; would there be any way to disable the laptop mouse? I've tried searching the BIOS, but no go. It's pretty "dumbed down", anyways.

You bring up another point, though. In my efforts to try and troubleshoot the mouse problem, I was looking to pick up a native PS/2 mouse from my thrift store, as I was using a USB mouse with a convertor to PS/2 at the time (I ended up buying three different mice, but that's beside the point). One of these was a serial mouse, but when I plug it into the serial port and reboot, the driver loads but fails to recognize the mouse. This happens with either the Microsoft driver or ctmouse. This also happens no matter which port I use; the one built in or the one on the Port Replicator. Does this mean the mouse is just shot?

I think I've solved the conflict for now, though. After trying to use every version of ctmouse I could get my hands on (including the bleeding edge v2.1b4), I ended up finding a newer version of Microsoft's MOUSE.COM (8.20) that seems to be pretty stable. And after running QEMM's OPTIMIZE program, it takes about as much memory as ctmouse would. So we'll see. The only thing that's bothering me now is that I can't find for the life of me the parameter list for this driver, so I can't enable the mouse's full capabilities. With MOUSE.COM 6.20 (the older version I was using), I could just run the program with a "/?" parameter to see the full list, but now with the newer version, it just loads up the driver and doesn't offer a help or anything. Grrr.

If all they do is draw power from the port, then you may not need any USB drivers at all... However, I seem to recall that the USB protocol has some method of having devices request certain power levels or something, so maybe it won't. I guess try it out and see what happens!

I did try this out, and it seemed to work great! The speakers had no problem drawing power, and the music sounded alright coming from the speakers. Probably the extent of usage that USB port will see, anyways.

There are a lot of older games that came out before Creative really made a name for themselves... in these cases, telling the game you have an AdLib sound card usually works, as the original Sound Blasters were basically just cloned AdLib cards with a bunch of extra features.

Interestingly enough, even though my laptop has a SoundBlaster Pro card installed, some games will freeze or crash upon loading or trying to play music when the game starts if I choose that option. Usually just choosing SoundBlaster regular or compatible fixes that problem, however.

Also, if you didn't realize it before, I got my Port Replicator in yesterday. Aside from testing out the serial mouse and USB speakers on it, I've also been testing out the gameport. On the same trip when I bought the mice, I also had the fortunate luck of grabbing an original Gravis Joystick, which, if I'm not mistaken, is probably the first video game controller I ever used (hard to say, as I was also using a Master System gamepad around that time). Anyways, I bought it, and took it home to test it out. After grabbing the Gravis Utilities off of Gravis' amazingly-still-active FTP server, I realized that this joystick was in bad need of some TLC. Using the calibration program and my trust flathead, I realigned the pots so that the cursor actually stayed in the middle (man, did they ever need to be tightened). The pots of the side were interesting to me in the fact that you could actually change how the buttons were set up. There are three buttons on the joystick but only two different inputs, so you could set up each button to be either Button 1, Button 2 or disable it altogether. Pretty intuitive, I thought, once you figure out what the heck the pots were for (For the longest time, I thought the buttons were just dying on me).

So as of now, the joystick works great. I'm not usually a fan of joysticks in particular, but for some games like SkyRoads, you need a joystick to play it -- keyboard play just isn't feasible in the least. So I'll keep it around.

Sidewinder pad still hasn't arrived, but when it does, I'll test it out with the DOS drivers and let you all know how well it performs.