Does your New Game Run OK? ........or do you spend three hours re-configuring your system, only to be told that a patch disc is an essential requirement and has been since 1989? A bit of semi-technical, quasi-nerdic rant from MerC There is no doubt that PC games have become more and more complex, and hence more and more demanding of system and system resources. Although they may specify minimum requirements of a 386SX, DOS 5.0 and 2Mb RAM, this set up will hardly ever allow your new purchase to run at its best. In fact, a fair few of them would still run slowly on a 486 DX2 with 4Mb. A decent video card (1Mb minimum) and sound card (100% Soundblaster compatible) are more-or-less essential requirements, and for the latest a double-speed CD ROM player is needed (these are dropping in price all the time - what cost œ200 in January should now be obtainable for œ170). A decent memory manager (e.g. QEMM) helps, and you may need to know how to set up a boot disc properly (the instructions in magazines such as PC Player are inadequate. Use their method, and you often end up with no access to your compressed drive(s) and less conventional memory than you had before). It also helps a great deal to know how to manipulate those twin terrors of the PC world : autoexec.bat and config.sys. (Should you spend a few hours familiarising yourself with such intricacies, you might be surprised to find you are more aware of what is going on than the youth at the end of a 'technical help-line'). It is also becoming clear that amongst the software big-boys, cynical profiteering is the order of the day. Why are games so expensive in the UK? Why is the ostensibly cheaper CD so much more costly than eight or nine high-density floppies - especially when CDs cannot be pirated in the same way as discs? Games are issued with grossly inadequate testing, requiring time-consuming obtaining of patch discs and undocumented instructions. I am not surprised at the constant whining of software companies ("Piracy is costing us œ1.2 billion a year, (...which could be spent paying your directors at the water-company levels?). No wonder every whiz kid worth his salt takes great delight in hacking and cracking. I suppose they see it as the punter getting a bit of his own back. Pirates are thieves, I do not dispute - but so are cowboys. My first (but far from only) experience of undocumented but vital set-up requirements was with a passably playable game called The Legacy. After ensuring that all the memory needs were being met, and all instructions followed, it still would not run. It transpired that NUMLOCK has to be set to OFF before installation. Nowhere was this mentioned, and it is not exactly an obvious prerequisite. (I still don't understand why it stops the mouse driver loading properly). It was only a chance remark from the receptionist at Microprose that put me on to it. I thought it might be interesting to tabulate the afflictions, some malignant, some benign, of the various games I have started (and sometimes finished) over the last few months : Game Tweaks ---- ------ Ultima Underworld l update disc required (1) Ultima Underworld ll patch disc required (2) The Legacy numlock OFF (3) Shadowcaster mouse driver in config.sys (4) The Elder Scrolls : Arena patch disc (5) The 7th Guest VESA driver needed (6) Crusaders of the Dark Savant wrong instruction after installation (7) Return to Zork none (8) Dragonsphere none (8) (1) Two fatal bugs, though you can continue in all innocence until about half-way through the game. Your inventory then starts irremediably to corrupt. Patch requires you to begin again (!) (2) Runs very slowly (486 DX 33MHz) when NPCs around. Patch disc helps, but not much. (3) A very simple, but undocumented requirement. With numlock ON (a common PC default) the mouse freezes. Game has to be booted with NUMLOCK set to OFF. (4) Shadowcaster is very memory hungry. (QEMM helps). In spite of having the required space, it would not run until I changed my mouse driver loading from a mouse.exe line in autoexec.bat to a DEVICE=mouse.sys line in the config.sys file. No idea why - seems peculiar to my set-up. (5) A large number of bugas (I leave this typo uncorrected) and inconveniences fixed by the patch. Game cannot be finished without it. See Review in this issue. (6) A VESA driver needs to be loaded. A variety of these to suit your model is supplied on request on a patch disk and can be copied to hard drive, then loaded during boot-up from a line in your autoexec.bat file. Seems to do no harm to leave it permanently in place. (7) To play after installation, just type DS. (8) Hoo-blooming-ray. Most incompatibility problems seem to stem from the sound card. For some reason, games programs are able to detect which video card you are running and adapt accordingly. This versatility rarely, however, extends to the sound card. (Apparently there is a much greater variety of sound cards in existence). For a start, your card should be Soundblaster compatible (most are, up to about 98%) set with the settings the game needs. Some can determine and use your settings, but others expect computer novices to set DMAs, IRQs etc. and is sheer laziness on the programmer's part. These settings are usually asked for at the end of a long installation procedure, and I'm sure are a cause of constant dismay. Before installing any game : read the technical documentation supplied. (This is often around 4-5 pages in length, which says something..). Get to the C: > prompt in DOS, and type Edit autoexec.bat. When the .bat file appears, take a note of the numbers after SET BLASTER=. These will be something like A220 I2 D0 T4. The installation usually only needs you to enter the first two or three. A final piece of advice : learn how to boot up with a MS-DOS Menu from config.sys. This means that you will not need to load any CD ROM device drivers (which occupy valuable memory) unless you are going to use CDs. The following table gives you some idea of memory allocations that work. (486 DX 33MHz) Route(1) Conventional(2) Kb Free EMS(3) Kb Loaded TSRs(4) DOS 6.2 634 2720 21 Windows 3.11 634 2640 (5) 21 DOS + CDs 634 2368 24 Windows + CDs 634 2368 (5) 24 (1) Optimised using QEMM memory manager (2) Largest executable program size. Without efficient management, extra TSRs eat into this (3) A well-designed program will grab as much of this as is available in order to run faster (4) Mostly essential to the system, and user transparent once loaded. Some optional (5) After exiting to DOS. NB : if you find most of this Table difficult to follow, you will also have problems understanding the requirements and loading instructions of many games. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Tips to Increase Available Memory (not for the faint-hearted) Before making any changes to autoexec.bat or config.sys save a copy of each to a safe place (a floppy disk). Also make a system boot disc and copy them to that. Don't forget to copy to this disk from your boot drive a file called Doublspace.bin if you have a compressed drive. If you hopelessly snarl up your system (it has been known) you can then put things back to how they were. a. "Files" and "Buffers" in config.sys should be set at 25 and 10 respectively. No need for "Stacks" or "FCBS" settings in this file and for a stand alone machine remove the line (if present) that begins Lastdrive=. b. In autoexec.bat, load Smartdrive with the figure 256 as the last parameter. c. Use the switch /MOVE at the end of the line which loads DoubleSpace d. If loading DosKeys use /bufsize=1280 /INSERT - o -