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this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2024
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Where're all the DOS kids at?! 5 hours and 66 comments, but not a single mention yet.
Never mind solving problems with Windows; shit gets real when the thing boots to a
C:\>prompt and you need to know things like the difference between CGA/EGA/VGA/Hercules graphics modes and WTF an IRQ is just to install your games in the first place.Kids these days don't know the pain of trying to get enough free conventional memory to run something.
or defragging a disk.
I was talking to a friend just the other day about that. I remember some application we used to reconfigure autoexec.bat to optimize it for one type of memory or the other, but I can't remember the name of the application (I think it came with the OS), and I can't remember what the different memory types were called either.
IIRC the application was just "edit.com", as in "edit autoexec.bat". The different kinds of memory were expanded memory, extended memory, and the high memory area; high memory was useful regardless which of the other two you were using, and those two were for the most part kind of interchangeable. You also typically had to mess with config.sys, which handled some things like the mouse driver. It was really common to have specific floppy disks that had only those two files on them (well, and were set to be bootable), so that if you needed a particular configuration for some game--maybe you didn't load the CD-ROM driver, since that took up a lot of precious low-memory kilobytes--you could leave your normal setup alone and just stick your custom boot disk in for that program. Some programs were really tricky to make enough room for, even if you had a ton of RAM, because that privileged low ram area was so hard to manage.
I figured it out - it was memmaker. It automatically edited autoexec.bat (and possibly also config.sys, I'm not sure).
Ah, yeah, I think that may actually have been a paid program. It was something folks were willing to pay not to have to do, because, as I say, it was surprisingly tricky to manage the memory below 640K.
Well, at least in our case, it wasn't something that we bought. I'm pretty sure it came with our MS-DOS.
Oh, you're right, it's right there in the link you shared--it was built in to MS-DOS, but only from version 6 on. I must have misremembered it as paid because it was something we didn't have, and then later we did.
You ran emm386.com as a TSR (terminate, stay present) to set up extended memory according to my very stretched memory
That might have been one way of doing it, but I seem to remember a more mnemonic name - something like "memmaker," perhaps?
Edit: Yep, it was memmaker.
memmaker?
That was it, yes.
If I was pressed, I could probably still write a config.sys to reallocate enough system memory to play Test Drive
Pop quiz: which graphics mode is that screenshot?
spoiler
My guess is CGA, palette 1, high intensity.
Now I'm glad I was at the tail end of DOS. My dad showed me how to interrupt the windows boot to get into DOS for Lemmings and Doom, but for everything else like Anno 1602, Need for Speed 2 and Age of Empires 1, I used Windows 95.
When windows was at version 3, I mostly had the computer booting to command prompt, type win to start windows
Though at some point I made a boot menu in autoexec.bat to let you choose windows, command prompt, or any of the games installed
DOS was a step backwards for me from Atari TOS.
What were the Atari terms of service?
/s
Easy mistake to make, but terms of service are abbreviated as ToS, not TOS ;-)
Ah, so you mean this:
Alright, I'll admit it: my first computer ran Tandy Deskmate, not just plain DOS.
Still, I did have to exit to a command line to run certain games, I think.
in a care home presumably
Listen here you little shit.
spoiler
(Seriously though, DOS kids are like ~40 years old. We're xennials, not boomers.)
I absolutely still remember my grandfather having a dual 5.25” IBM and teaching my 6-7 yo self how to use the cli. I still remember that MSDOS 2.0 box he had up on his shelf, and how he taught me to keep a simple text file of the prices of my baseball cards, according to the legendary Beckett price guide.
I then later vaguely messing around with 3.11 followed by 95+, but the basis of my mediocre understanding of the cli was due to my grandfather teaching me on DOS 2.0.
The only thing I remember from that era is inserting floppy dics to play games
DOS5 here, installed from 5.25" floppies on a tiny HDD and looking at one of those awful shades-of-yellow monitors.
That's if you don't count the computer that didn't have a hard drive and ONLY booted from 3.5" floppy (which was just enough to get a bootable DOS disk and Prince of Persia).
IRQ's were great for choice. You got to your modem, video card, and soundcard and then picked which two would actually work when they all wanted IRQ5 or 7
I remember when discs got big enough that we could have windows 3.1 installed as well as a current tech game
I will not miss setting up interrupts for cards, I will not miss setting up extended memory
Though all that would have been easier were I older. I was in my 20s when Linux became available and the early experience with DOS had me happy to dive right into that
tweaking himem.sys was a skill in and of itself :-)
“What is that high memory area stuff they added in DOS4?”
gets swallowed by rabbit hole for days
“Oh, that!”
I had 3.1, 95, 98se, XP(teenager).
I got in at I'd say the best time. XP for the Internet as a teenager was absolutely the best time to be a teenager with computers.
Does anyone still know the
C>prompt?