Windows 95 - Friend or Foe? An article by Bill Commons Well I have finally done it! No I have not completed that very hard adventure that I have been wading through for the past few months, I have managed to convince Windows 95 that I want to play my DOS games. I have not found a solution because I think that Microsoft have spawned the fledgling of Hal the computer in 2001, A Space Odyssey. It is a thug, a creeping bindweed that takes over your programs. To put you in the picture I must give you a bit of my history. I will go back to November 95 and I tried to load a demo of Stonekeep from the CD on the front of a magazine. It said "you need 8 meg of memory to run Stonekeep." But I have 8 meg says I. I then bought a further 8 meg and the game loaded. I then noticed that my hard drive was nearly full, so I invested in a 1 gigabyte HD. Unfortunately I was not aware at that time that my old (1 year) computer would not recognize anything above 540meg without a drive overlay. This is where Windows 95 enters. I read the advertisement hype, "Never have a problem with out of memory messages again, Windows 95 will take over and make your computer run faster and more efficiently, and will make your DOS based programs run better." I loaded the program and absolutely nothing would run, I was reduced to playing Solitaire and Freecell for hours on end. I read the instructions and it said that I could press a function key and I could reboot into my old Windows and DOS, huh, I pressed all function keys and every other key to get rid of the thing, in the end I reformatted the drive and started again. The two hard drives that I had worked OK together but using my sledgehammer to crack a walnut method I loaded one drive with DOS 6.2 and the other with Win95. I then had a permanently open computer case and I would swap the drive leads over when I wanted to play an adventure. Now the Internet has hundreds of letters each week with methods of getting DOS applications to work alongside Win95, also as many replies saying that they do not work! I tried them all without success. It was not only games that I had problems with, I have an account with Piper Dial for Internet access and every three weeks or so I found that it refused to load and after a couple of hours on the telephone to Cambridge from Thanet a few times I was told that I had a conflict with Win95. The solution each time was to reinstall the Piper software and this meant re-registering and losing all my bookmarks and email contact addresses, plus the first two times I had to make a long distance telephone call to get the upgrades to get me back to my original status. It seems that Microsoft use the same file names as Piper and Win 95 overwrites the Piper ones. I then took the bull by the horns and deleted all the MS files with the former names and all seemed OK. Imagine my surprise when a couple of weeks later these files were back and I was refused access to the net again. Anyway back to my main beef. I was not too happy changing the hard drive leads over but it was a way out, Not so, one day I plugged in my DOS drive and was told that drive A does not exist! I put it back to Win95 drive and no problem. This is the same drive remember. I went down to the computer shop and was advised that it was a faulty floppy, IO card, lead and after replacing all of these one at a time the problem still existed. I then used the ultimate folly. I thought that Hal had put a message on my DOS drive to tell it to ignore the floppy unless it was in command, I formatted the drive to start from afresh. Of course now I could not get to the A or C drive. Things were now desperate, I was back to Solitaire. I used bits from every solution including some from professional programmers and Microsoft itself. This caused some odd messages to be displayed mostly that I did not have enough memory to run this application, the worst result was a shut down to green mode with only the monitor light flashing and no amount of switching off and on or even leaving it off overnight would reset it. The funny thing was a simple thing like switching the printer off would result in the computer springing to life, except the next time it would be the unplugging of the modem. This convinced me that there is an evil entity installed alongside the program. One writer on the Net had an answer that he would build a spare computer from all the bits that he had acquired and I was rapidly reaching the same state. The problem seemed to be that Windows, drivespace, comms software and drive overlay all took a bit of conventional memory and I was left with only 470K from the original 640. If I started up by pressing F8 and using step by step configuration I was still below the required amount of memory. Anyway I first of all renamed Drvspace.bin to Drvspace.bac as I did not want any compressed drive drivers. I then made a DOS start up short cut, I will explain how I did this but if it seems a bit basic to all the computer wizzkids please forgive me. First from the desktop I did a right mouse button click. This brings up a small window, click on new. Then click on shortcut, type in the name for the shortcut eg. DM2.BAT, then select an icon. There is one that is a bundle of dynamite with a plunger and this seems appropriate. Right click on this new icon on the desktop and select properties. Click on programme and click on advanced. Another window will come up with a PIF name, click on MS-DOS mode and specify new MS-DOS configuration. By the way I copied my original Config.sys and Autoexec.bat on to a floppy for safety sake and this has proved very useful for going back to square one if things go wrong, and believe me, with Damien inside your computer this can happen. In the config.sys box of this new window I left the lines - DOS=HIGH,UMB DEVICE=C: \WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS REM to this I added DOS=NOAUTO DEVICE=C :\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE RAM=E000-EFFF REM this is supposed to allow the computer to use the RAM as ems or xms as it wants. All I know is that it works for me. BUFFERS=30 FILES=30 REM I then entered the sound card drivers from my original Config.sys and if required my CD ROM driver.(not necessary for Dungeon Master2) Then go down to the Autoexec.bat box and delete all the instructions that you do not require to play the game, in my case the Comms drivers and Virus checker. So the new Autoexec.bat looks like this SET PROMPT $P$G C:\DOS\MMOUSE.COM SET SOUND=C:\SB16 SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6 C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\MSCDEX /D:MSCD000 REM the above lines will vary with your sound card CD drive and mouse driver. REM I then typed in the path to the game I wanted the shortcut to point to but I am not sure if this is necessary. Click on OK and go back to the desktop. When you click on this icon now the computer will shut down and restart in DOS mode. It will still be in the C:\WINDOWS directory so I made lots of little batch files to point to the game I wanted to play. To do this enter EDIT DM2.BAT or whatever and when the blue screen comes up type in CD C:\ CD INTRPLAY CD SKULKEEP DM2 X Y I have tried this and can now play the following games, Stonekeep, Dungeon Master 2, EOB3, Ultimate Fantasies and Ultima Underworlds 1 and 2. Unfortunately 1 still can't get Ultima 7 and 7.5 to work as these two will not work with EMM386 memory manager. When I try to remove this and type in MEM I am told that I have 590k of conventional memory, but when try to run the games I an told that I only have 6880 bytes available. I will keep trying though as some people have managed it. @~I mentioned Bill's problems re Ultima 7 and 7.5 to Alex over the @~phone and he said, try the following: @~Don't remove EMM386. Press F8 before you get by the screen with @~the clouds. You have 7 options. 1 - normal, 2 - logged, 3 safe @~mode, 4 - safe mode without network, 5 - step by step @~configuration, 6 - command prompt only and 7 - safe mode with @~command prompt only. @~Go to 5 - step by step - and select Y/N on all drivers. eg when @~it processes CONFIG.SYS, say no to HIMEM.SYS and EMM386 and so @~forth. Or you can do the same in option 6 ... Sue - o -