Oh man, that reminds me of the 90s. You used to have this situation where certain games required a certain memory configuration (640K / extended memory).
So the first thing I did that ever resembled programming was a boot script that would give you a menu of which game you wanted to play. It would say "1) Beneath a Steel Sky 2) Dune 2 " etc. And they it would prompt you to put the right CDROM in.
> Oh man, that reminds me of the 90s. You used to have this situation where certain games required a certain memory configuration (640K / extended memory).
Origin games often requires that kind of things... but they were the best games of all on MS-DOS PCs! I remember the time when most people wanted to buy a PC because of Wing Commander.
My one abiding memory of this situation was `dwcfgmg.sys` (Dos and Windows Configuration Manager?) which was the DOS driver for ISA plug n' play devices. I was at that nexus between the "old" world of MS-DOS games where you had to program IRQ and DMA settings for your sound card, and the "new" world of graphical environments and plug n' play.
So as you say, even with 8MB in XMS (or sometimes EMS, depending on the game I think, using EMM 386), the 640k boundary was an issue and I too had the joys of paring down my `autoexec.bat` and `config.sys`
But no `dwcfgmg.sys` and my "plug n' play" soundcard wouldn't work. It was a small driver, but the games of the day seemed to demand the entire 640k at startup or they just wouldn't work :(
So often it was no sound, or no game at all. Oh what I would've given to trade that for manual soundcard configuration.
Yes, those were the times. Using choice for menus, configuration for games that need a lot of conventional memory, putting drivers in HMA (High Memory Area) just to save those few kilobytes. Using QEMM to access XMS/EMS. Also, sound card drivers configuration was a pain. Good times :)
