Got an old 486DX4/100 last weekend

[gortmertl0]

Quite a coincidence, but MusicallyInspired stole my thunder...

His story sound similar to mine, however: Bought a 486DX2/66 in 1993, but sold it in mid-1996 to help pay for a new Pentium 1-166.  A friend of mine at work gave me an old Packard Bell 486 DX4/133 to fix up a couple of years ago.  Unfortunately, I got fed-up with waiting for a buddy to help me set it up -- going on 2 years now because he 'never had time' -- but he was going to donate the coveted parts for the upgrade...

So instead, I bought a reconditioned 486 DX2/100 from a guy I met through Ebay who fixes them up to spec for gaming platforms.

It's an IBM Aptive 550 486DX4/100 with 16 MB RAM, a 3.5" floppy, 24x CDROM, 1.2 GB HD and a SoundBlaster 16 card.  Unfortunately, there's no room on the case for a 5.25", so I sacrificed my 2x CD-RW from my P1-166 (which originally had a 5.25" floppy) to install the 5.25" that was from my wife's old 386 -- whew!

With the 5.25" floppy, I can finally copy over my "Adventures of Willie Beamish" diskettes to 3.5"...  Don't know why I never did it when I had an operational 5.25" drive; I certainly backed-up all of my other Sierra games, both 3.5"s & 5.25"s...

So, now I'm ready for any and all Sierra games (plus a few LucasArts)!

First game game up?  "Betrayal At Krondor"

Funny thing was, I could not get the diskette version to run.  Granted, it was a back-up copy, but I kept getting a "Not enough memory" error, no matter what I did to the autoexec.bat and config.sys files.  No mouse, no soundcard -- and I even had 634KB Base Memory + 4096KB EMS Memory available, and I still got the "Not enough memory" error.  I read and re-read everything on BAK boot disks, from files I saved from the old Sierra BBS to current forum advice on how to run it on Windows XP -- anything, just trying to find an answer.  I also tried to patch it, as I had heard sometimes it helps, but the patch from Sierra.com didn't install properly -- I couldn't even get that to work.

Aside from manually making a boot-disk, I never had a problem with the diskette version on my old 486...  

So, I dug up my CDROM version, and the darn thing booted up like a charm after installation.  :?   I might have to dig up my original diskettes and try BAK again; I certainly need to do so in order to find "AoWB".

Gary

[MusicallyInspired]

Wow, nice! Just what I wanted! Good luck with it.

[DrJ]

As I said in the other thread, it's a big challenge to get your DOS memory as freed up as possible.

I've had lots of good experiences with MEMMAKER (EMM368) from DOS. Altho certain programs/games/demos do not like EMS memory. You can also have MEMMAKER not use EMS memory, but getting enough free memory could be a problem.

If you need help give me a shout. I do try to keep up visiting the forum from time to time, but my free time has been taken up by World of Warcraft. Running my own guild and a raid alliance takes up a lot of free time.

Altho I do believe lots of people here are still experts when it comes to meddling with CONFIG.SYS & AUTOEXEC.BAT files


EDIT: Just realised that getting enough memory wasn't your problem. Oh well.. just proves my point again how memory could be a hassle in the DOS days

[QBiN]

As I said in the other thread, it's a big challenge to get your DOS memory as freed up as possible.

I've had lots of good experiences with MEMMAKER (EMM368) from DOS. Altho certain programs/games/demos do not like EMS memory. You can also have MEMMAKER not use EMS memory, but getting enough free memory could be a problem.

Yeah, I'm going to have to disagree with you there DrJ. While, I too have at times experienced the strange "This is not a QEMM error", DOS's MemMaker will just not cut it for certain games requiring > 600K of memory, like Falcon 3.0.

Not to mention later versions of QEMM (v7 or work extremely well with DOS 6+ Bootmenu's where you can optimize only certain boot configurations. QEMM gave me (in one configuration) 649,000 bytes out of 655,360 of conventional memory.

One last pro for QEMM, it's one of the few DOS memory managers that can address and convert to EMS or DPMI more than 64MB of total system memory. Try that Memmaker. Not a biggie for most, but really handy in DesqView with lots of apps running simultaneously.

[DrJ]

Yeah, I'm going to have to disagree with you there DrJ. While, I too have at times experienced the strange "This is not a QEMM error", DOS's MemMaker will just not cut it for certain games requiring > 600K of memory, like Falcon 3.0.

Not to mention later versions of QEMM (v7 or work extremely well with DOS 6+ Bootmenu's where you can optimize only certain boot configurations.

I stand corrected! I've only had experience with QEMM 6.x and that was a pain in the backside! Lots of crashes while playing games, having the nice midi music hang until you totally turned off the PC.

Anyways, good to hear there are still DOS-guru's around here People always look at me funny when I do certain thing in DOS (XCOPY for instance) instead of using Windows..

[gortmertl0]

Anyways, good to hear there are still DOS-guru's around here People always look at me funny when I do certain thing in DOS (XCOPY for instance) instead of using Windows..

Yes, same here...

Since our IT Dept at work is rather red-tape-ish and bureaucratic (ie, hard to use), I still write small DOS batch files in XP to back-up my work files to other places on the network.

Since we have more network storage space than can be reasonably used, it sure beats asking someone to pull out a back-up data tape to find the one file I might be needing...  

Gary