The Evolution of DOS Games and Boot Disks

In the early days of PC gaming, boot disks were an essential tool for gamers who wanted to play classic games without having to spend hours tweaking their system settings. A boot disk was essentially a floppy disk that contained a compressed version of the game's startup files, reducing the amount of drivers needed to run the game. This approach made it easier for gamers to play DOS games on machines with limited memory.

The process of creating a boot disk typically involved using a tool called the "maker" program, which analyzed the system's startup files and applied tweaks automatically. The maker would then create a blank boot disk image with optimized memory settings, allowing the gamer to load the game without having to manually configure the system settings. This was especially useful for gamers who didn't want to spend time tweaking their system settings or dealing with complex configuration files.

The use of boot disks and maker programs became increasingly popular in the early 1990s, as more games began to require more memory to run. The development of 32-bit DOS extenders, such as D4GW, allowed games to take advantage of higher memory addresses, but this was still a relatively new technology at the time.

The author of the article used one of these maker programs to create a boot disk for TIE Fighter, a popular game from the early 1990s. The process involved running the maker program on the system's startup files and creating a blank boot disk image with optimized memory settings. The result was a compressed version of the game's startup files, reduced to 6117 kilobytes, which allowed the game to run smoothly on machines with limited memory.

In addition to creating boot disks, the author also developed a custom boot menu for MS-DOS games. This boot menu provided a convenient way for gamers to select different configuration options, such as mouse and CD-ROM drivers, before loading the game. The author's boot menu was designed to be easy to use and understand, making it accessible to both beginners and experienced users.

The development of custom boot menus like this one allowed gamers to take control of their system settings and optimize their performance for specific games. This approach also helped to ensure that classic DOS games continued to run smoothly on modern machines, even when using 32-bit DOS extenders.

The author's experience with the maker program and boot menu is a testament to the ingenuity and creativity of early PC gamers. By developing tools like these, gamers were able to overcome technical challenges and enjoy their favorite games without having to sacrifice performance or compatibility.

In conclusion, the evolution of DOS games and boot disks was an important part of the PC gaming experience in the 1980s and 1990s. The use of maker programs and custom boot menus allowed gamers to optimize their system settings and run classic games smoothly on machines with limited memory. These tools also helped to pave the way for modern game development, which has continued to push the boundaries of what is possible in terms of performance and compatibility.

The author's personal experience with DOS gaming is a reminder that even simple systems can be complex and challenging to optimize. By developing custom solutions like boot menus and maker programs, gamers were able to overcome technical challenges and enjoy their favorite games without sacrificing performance or compatibility.

Modern game development has continued to evolve, with the use of 32-bit DOS extenders allowing games to take advantage of higher memory addresses. The author's experience with these technologies is a testament to the ingenuity and creativity of early PC gamers, who paved the way for modern game development.

The use of Windows 98 and MS-DOS 6.22 has also brought new challenges to the table, as these operating systems require more memory than older versions. However, the author's experience with these operating systems has shown that with a little creativity and problem-solving, it is possible to overcome technical challenges and enjoy classic games on modern machines.

In summary, the evolution of DOS games and boot disks was an important part of the PC gaming experience in the 1980s and 1990s. The use of maker programs and custom boot menus allowed gamers to optimize their system settings and run classic games smoothly on machines with limited memory. These tools also helped to pave the way for modern game development, which has continued to push the boundaries of what is possible in terms of performance and compatibility.

The author's experience with DOS gaming is a reminder that even simple systems can be complex and challenging to optimize. By developing custom solutions like boot menus and maker programs, gamers were able to overcome technical challenges and enjoy their favorite games without sacrificing performance or compatibility.

If you have any experiences or stories about your time playing DOS games, please share them in the comments below. The author is always eager to hear from readers and is excited to continue exploring the world of classic PC gaming.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: endos games are absolutely beautiful Classics like Doom Wing Commander or Prince of Persia but some games are difficult to run for example here on the screen we have the game Wing commander and it's complaining about not having enough memory however the machine I'm running this game on has 128 megab of ram let's give this video a bit of context we're going back to the year 1988 this is the computer Shopper Magazine and back in those days our first family PC was a 286 very similar looking to this one we had EGA with an EGA monitor 640 Koby of ram which is quite important and of course a 5 and A4 in floppy drive and the hard drive I believe was 20 MB and of course this channel is about games so let's have a look at some of the games that I remember playing on the machine this is on the Dos days website which is an excellent resource so some of the games I remember playing definitely the first king's quest and I remember playing F-15 Strike Eagle as well as King's Quest 2 in 1987 of course I remember playing the elite version for the PC and they're usually more adventure games which is one of my passions we had leure Suit Larry manic man I police quest of course space Quest 2 and test drive these are all games I vividly remember 1989 had heaps of games but some of them would already push the performance of a 286 and offered VGA Graphics which had more colors than EG A10 Tank Killer battle chess Budokan we've got heaps of Sierra adventure games F-15 Strike Eagle 2 we have Indiana Jones and the Last Cru play Indianapolis 500 I remember playing Prince of Persia of course um space Quest 3 test drive 2 and Xenon 2 so back in the 80s 640 kiloby of ram well that was all you needed all the games just work you didn't have to mck around with editing your startup FS MS DOS the game and all the drivers they fitted into the ram without any dramas for this project I'm afraid I don't have access to a 286 so the next best thing is of course a super socket 7 machine that we can slow down with disabling caches and other tricks so it's running at 233 mahz and the Machine has 128 megabytes of ram these are typical startup FS for such a machine there was no optical disc drive no networking yet but we did have a mouse so we're loading the standard Microsoft mouse driver let's run the mem command and have a look at how much memory we have available so we have 545 kiloby of RAM and this table here is interesting we can see a breakdown including the upper memory we will come back to that later so we can see how much MOS the command and the mouse driver how many kilobytes it takes up in total but we have 545 kiloby of conventional memory available and that was plenty all these games I mentioned should work just fine with this amount of memory so let's have a look at some games from 1990 onwards and we can see here it mentions already a 386 DX with more memory and VGA Graphics so stunts I remember playing this one what else have we got here we have f29 Retaliator I remember playing this game king's quest 5 beautiful graph links an interesting golf game the L HX attack chopper Loom of course midwinter I remember these games vividly Red Baron of course Monkey Island rise of the Dragon so heaps of games and of course test drive three and here we have Wing commander in 1991 the trend continues games had more impressive Graphics animations sound effects with the sound blaster so the games became more complex more demanding and of course the hardware also became more powerful to match those requirements this is the VES dank tle from 1993 and we can have a look at some of the specifications of typical computers so we already have here 486 computers and in terms of amount of memory this one has 8 megabytes this one has 4 MB and 80 mgab of hard drive on this one this one has 210 megabytes so the memory amount yeah increased and also what changed where all the accessories so let's zoom in a little bit here we've got things like the CD ROM drive you could get a scanner we've got a streamer which is a tape backup device so Hardware yeah also pushed up the demand for more memory now let's try playing a game from 1990 which is Wing Commander I want you to pay attention to this message here no expanded memory detected and then it's also throwing a message that we do not have enough memory to play Wing Commander despite the fact the machine having 128 megabytes of ram so what is going on here well it all has to do with backwards compatibility so as the PCS improved we still wanted to be able to run previous software so when you turn on a Dos PC it boots up in something called real mode and it uses a concept of conventional memory which is only 640 kiloby based on previous PC architecture in order to be compatible with Legacy software this Legacy memory amount of 640 kiloby it's called conventional memory and for some of the more modern games we need to optimize our memory to have as much conventional RAM available as possible let's go back to trying to run Wing Commander because this game really addresses a lot of issues to do with memory so the first one is we need to have as much conventional memory available so this is the memory from 0 to 640 kilobytes and the second aspect is we need something called expanded memory so here again at the startup FS I have included the driver for the CD ROM drive so we've got a line here and then we also need a second driver in the auto exic batch file to get the CD ROM driver working in terms of memory it doesn't look too good we only have available 490 kiloby so by the early 1990s if you still have a machine with just conventional memory configured yeah gaming was a real struggle you simply didn't have enough memory so there are a lot of things we can do to optimize the amount of conventional memory the first one is we can replace the standard drivers so this CD ROM driver is a standard Oak driver it uses quite a lot of storage and we can replace that with a better one that has a smaller memory footprint this driver is well respected by the community it's compatible with games and doesn't require as much m memory we can do the same thing with the mouse driver so this is the default Microsoft mouse driver quite large in terms of how much memory it takes up we can replace that with the cute mouse driver which again has uh a requirement for much less memory let's reboot the machine we have 490 kiloby before and now 527 kiloby so that's already a nice Improvement well that's still not enough conventional memory for many games so let's have a look at this Wikipedia article very interesting it helps us explain what's going on there is a interesting part of the memory called high memory area so we've got the first 640 Koby of memory this is the conventional memory that we want to maximize and this High memory area we can use the memory manager to load part of msos into this area to increase the amount of conventional m memory and to do that we need to edit our config file let's paste this line here which loads the high driver and then we need a command here dos equals High the high memory manager also achieves a second goal it enables what's called extended memory that some games can take advantage of and then we will reboot our machine here we go and we can see the following now that MS DOS the amount of conventional memory it uses is now reduced only 15 kilobytes and all in all we now have 585 kiloby of conventional memory and more games that were failing before are now working however we can increase the amount of conventional memory even further upper memory area is the magic keyword we can see it here it's a special region of the memory from 640 KOB to 1 Megabyte and we can use that to load some of the drivers that are currently sitting in conventional memory we can load them into the area and for that we need the emm 386 memory manager this will also give us expanded memory so we need to edit our config file again let's paste another line here for the emm 386 and up here we need to add something comma U MB and there's more to do for every device driver that we want to load High we have to use the device High command we also need to do the same thing in the auto EXA file with the LH which is short for load High command let's save the file and reboot the machine here we go look at that it's a lot more conventional memory 617 kiloby and we can see in Upper memory we now have the CD driver the MSC de driver is also loaded and the mouse driver all of these have been successfully loaded into the upper memory area and we also have expanded memory so we can try win Commander here we go Wing Commander expanded memory detected and fully used in the game launches without any issues most games but not all of them but the vast majority of games will work perfectly fine with this configuration because we have huge amounts of conventional memory as well as expanded memory which a handful of games take advantage of most games but not all of them turen 2 the PC version is one of these games we will get a message here and it tells us remove any memory managers like emm 386 only leave leave High driver alone in your config file so to summarize what we did we replaced the drivers with drivers that have a low memory print for the CD Rum Drive as well as for the mouse then we used two memory managers the first one high M which does two things with the Dos equals High command it lets us load some of the MSD operating system into an area outside of the conventional memory it also will enable extended memory and then we can use the emm 386 memory manager in combination with the comma um option to load device drivers into the memory area outside of the conventional memory by using device high or load high and that will also give us expanded memory which quite a few games especially games from origin like to use so you can imagine back in the day you bought a game you installed it on your computer and you just couldn't make it to run because of some issues with the memory and it was a big ask to manually edit your startup FS it was difficult maybe you didn't have the patience so a lot of games actually came with utilities to create a boot dis and you then booted the machine from that floppy boot dis which had a yeah a cut down version of your startup files reducing the amount of drivers in order for you to play the game here we have TIE fighter and this game has a boot dis command and well it will actually go through your startup fs and then create a blank boot dis with the memory optimized to run this game so this was one approach to make life easier for gamers that didn't want to spend too much time figuring out how to optimize their memory and of course we have to mention the mmaker tool which which can yeah analyze your startup fils and then apply some tweaks automatically so let's just go through the process and see what happens so it did a bunch of reboots and it's now asking us if the system is working properly well we just going to say yes it is and yeah before man maker this was the amount of memory and now we have this much but remember we had EMS deactivated so let's have a look at the up files there you go so it added the emm386 line and this is the previous one from myself um for the device High and the load High commands it seems to have added a parameter here and let's look at the final result we have 6117 kilobytes which is exactly what we had before with my manual method but I have to admit my system is fairly straightforward I don't have any scuzzy or any other device drivers necessary and finally this was also the era of fancy boot menus and this is my contribution to the Retro PC Community those of you who have been following me for a while you know this boot menu very well it's part of the msdos starter pack you can download it from my website and yeah it sets you up with a nice boot menu where you can choose between expanded extended and conventional memory the first three options give you Mouse and CD ROM driver the next three options remove the optical dis driver and then finally without Mouse without Optical disk drivers and the option conventional memory only apparently there are some games out there if they don't find MS DOS in the conventional memory they freak out they think oh this this is impossible where is dos and then will not run I'm not aware of exactly which games fall under that category if you know please leave a comment down below so yeah this is what I use so far every game that I've come across and tested has been working with this boot menu just fine on a range of machines not just on a penum 2 also on a 386 486 Alon 64 you name it and and I've been uh yeah I got good feedback as well so it's sort of has stood the test of time and has been put through its Paces by you guys out there we do have some good news more modern games like Doom or descent they use what's called a 32-bit dos extender dos 4gw you might have seen it in the splash screen when you load up a game and that let's the software use the entire amount of RAM on a 386 or higher processor so guys to summarize this situation in the beginning things just worked the 640 KOB of conventional memory well that was all you needed and also the late era of Dos games also everything just worked because they used 32-bit dos extenders it is this transition period in between where the developers the software pushed the limits and demanded more and more memory and yeah the industry wasn't quite just ready yet I do hope you found this video interesting and helpful and that terms like conventional memory and expanded extended memory as well as loading Doss into the high memory area and loading device drivers into the high memory I hope it cleared up some of the confusion and do check out my mistos stter pack I put it together for beginners but also for people that do know how to edit config fars and auto exic batch for but it's just yeah another barrier that stops us from enjoying these classic fantastic dos retro games I do want to hear from you about your experience with M maker my personal experience was well it didn't really do too much sometimes you even got a worse outcome so I always tweaked things manually and my motto is less is more so I like a lean system also if you're using Windows 98 and Ms 7.1 the memory requirements are a little bit higher so Ms 6.22 will have a smaller memory footprint meaning it will give you more conventional memory without any tweaking so there you have it I hope you found the video interesting leave your dos memory stories Down Below in the comments I will check your comments Saturday morning with a cup of coffee and it's something I really look forward to and treasure and that's it for this one thank you so much for watching and I shall see you soon with another onedos games are absolutely beautiful Classics like Doom Wing Commander or Prince of Persia but some games are difficult to run for example here on the screen we have the game Wing commander and it's complaining about not having enough memory however the machine I'm running this game on has 128 megab of ram let's give this video a bit of context we're going back to the year 1988 this is the computer Shopper Magazine and back in those days our first family PC was a 286 very similar looking to this one we had EGA with an EGA monitor 640 Koby of ram which is quite important and of course a 5 and A4 in floppy drive and the hard drive I believe was 20 MB and of course this channel is about games so let's have a look at some of the games that I remember playing on the machine this is on the Dos days website which is an excellent resource so some of the games I remember playing definitely the first king's quest and I remember playing F-15 Strike Eagle as well as King's Quest 2 in 1987 of course I remember playing the elite version for the PC and they're usually more adventure games which is one of my passions we had leure Suit Larry manic man I police quest of course space Quest 2 and test drive these are all games I vividly remember 1989 had heaps of games but some of them would already push the performance of a 286 and offered VGA Graphics which had more colors than EG A10 Tank Killer battle chess Budokan we've got heaps of Sierra adventure games F-15 Strike Eagle 2 we have Indiana Jones and the Last Cru play Indianapolis 500 I remember playing Prince of Persia of course um space Quest 3 test drive 2 and Xenon 2 so back in the 80s 640 kiloby of ram well that was all you needed all the games just work you didn't have to mck around with editing your startup FS MS DOS the game and all the drivers they fitted into the ram without any dramas for this project I'm afraid I don't have access to a 286 so the next best thing is of course a super socket 7 machine that we can slow down with disabling caches and other tricks so it's running at 233 mahz and the Machine has 128 megabytes of ram these are typical startup FS for such a machine there was no optical disc drive no networking yet but we did have a mouse so we're loading the standard Microsoft mouse driver let's run the mem command and have a look at how much memory we have available so we have 545 kiloby of RAM and this table here is interesting we can see a breakdown including the upper memory we will come back to that later so we can see how much MOS the command and the mouse driver how many kilobytes it takes up in total but we have 545 kiloby of conventional memory available and that was plenty all these games I mentioned should work just fine with this amount of memory so let's have a look at some games from 1990 onwards and we can see here it mentions already a 386 DX with more memory and VGA Graphics so stunts I remember playing this one what else have we got here we have f29 Retaliator I remember playing this game king's quest 5 beautiful graph links an interesting golf game the L HX attack chopper Loom of course midwinter I remember these games vividly Red Baron of course Monkey Island rise of the Dragon so heaps of games and of course test drive three and here we have Wing commander in 1991 the trend continues games had more impressive Graphics animations sound effects with the sound blaster so the games became more complex more demanding and of course the hardware also became more powerful to match those requirements this is the VES dank tle from 1993 and we can have a look at some of the specifications of typical computers so we already have here 486 computers and in terms of amount of memory this one has 8 megabytes this one has 4 MB and 80 mgab of hard drive on this one this one has 210 megabytes so the memory amount yeah increased and also what changed where all the accessories so let's zoom in a little bit here we've got things like the CD ROM drive you could get a scanner we've got a streamer which is a tape backup device so Hardware yeah also pushed up the demand for more memory now let's try playing a game from 1990 which is Wing Commander I want you to pay attention to this message here no expanded memory detected and then it's also throwing a message that we do not have enough memory to play Wing Commander despite the fact the machine having 128 megabytes of ram so what is going on here well it all has to do with backwards compatibility so as the PCS improved we still wanted to be able to run previous software so when you turn on a Dos PC it boots up in something called real mode and it uses a concept of conventional memory which is only 640 kiloby based on previous PC architecture in order to be compatible with Legacy software this Legacy memory amount of 640 kiloby it's called conventional memory and for some of the more modern games we need to optimize our memory to have as much conventional RAM available as possible let's go back to trying to run Wing Commander because this game really addresses a lot of issues to do with memory so the first one is we need to have as much conventional memory available so this is the memory from 0 to 640 kilobytes and the second aspect is we need something called expanded memory so here again at the startup FS I have included the driver for the CD ROM drive so we've got a line here and then we also need a second driver in the auto exic batch file to get the CD ROM driver working in terms of memory it doesn't look too good we only have available 490 kiloby so by the early 1990s if you still have a machine with just conventional memory configured yeah gaming was a real struggle you simply didn't have enough memory so there are a lot of things we can do to optimize the amount of conventional memory the first one is we can replace the standard drivers so this CD ROM driver is a standard Oak driver it uses quite a lot of storage and we can replace that with a better one that has a smaller memory footprint this driver is well respected by the community it's compatible with games and doesn't require as much m memory we can do the same thing with the mouse driver so this is the default Microsoft mouse driver quite large in terms of how much memory it takes up we can replace that with the cute mouse driver which again has uh a requirement for much less memory let's reboot the machine we have 490 kiloby before and now 527 kiloby so that's already a nice Improvement well that's still not enough conventional memory for many games so let's have a look at this Wikipedia article very interesting it helps us explain what's going on there is a interesting part of the memory called high memory area so we've got the first 640 Koby of memory this is the conventional memory that we want to maximize and this High memory area we can use the memory manager to load part of msos into this area to increase the amount of conventional m memory and to do that we need to edit our config file let's paste this line here which loads the high driver and then we need a command here dos equals High the high memory manager also achieves a second goal it enables what's called extended memory that some games can take advantage of and then we will reboot our machine here we go and we can see the following now that MS DOS the amount of conventional memory it uses is now reduced only 15 kilobytes and all in all we now have 585 kiloby of conventional memory and more games that were failing before are now working however we can increase the amount of conventional memory even further upper memory area is the magic keyword we can see it here it's a special region of the memory from 640 KOB to 1 Megabyte and we can use that to load some of the drivers that are currently sitting in conventional memory we can load them into the area and for that we need the emm 386 memory manager this will also give us expanded memory so we need to edit our config file again let's paste another line here for the emm 386 and up here we need to add something comma U MB and there's more to do for every device driver that we want to load High we have to use the device High command we also need to do the same thing in the auto EXA file with the LH which is short for load High command let's save the file and reboot the machine here we go look at that it's a lot more conventional memory 617 kiloby and we can see in Upper memory we now have the CD driver the MSC de driver is also loaded and the mouse driver all of these have been successfully loaded into the upper memory area and we also have expanded memory so we can try win Commander here we go Wing Commander expanded memory detected and fully used in the game launches without any issues most games but not all of them but the vast majority of games will work perfectly fine with this configuration because we have huge amounts of conventional memory as well as expanded memory which a handful of games take advantage of most games but not all of them turen 2 the PC version is one of these games we will get a message here and it tells us remove any memory managers like emm 386 only leave leave High driver alone in your config file so to summarize what we did we replaced the drivers with drivers that have a low memory print for the CD Rum Drive as well as for the mouse then we used two memory managers the first one high M which does two things with the Dos equals High command it lets us load some of the MSD operating system into an area outside of the conventional memory it also will enable extended memory and then we can use the emm 386 memory manager in combination with the comma um option to load device drivers into the memory area outside of the conventional memory by using device high or load high and that will also give us expanded memory which quite a few games especially games from origin like to use so you can imagine back in the day you bought a game you installed it on your computer and you just couldn't make it to run because of some issues with the memory and it was a big ask to manually edit your startup FS it was difficult maybe you didn't have the patience so a lot of games actually came with utilities to create a boot dis and you then booted the machine from that floppy boot dis which had a yeah a cut down version of your startup files reducing the amount of drivers in order for you to play the game here we have TIE fighter and this game has a boot dis command and well it will actually go through your startup fs and then create a blank boot dis with the memory optimized to run this game so this was one approach to make life easier for gamers that didn't want to spend too much time figuring out how to optimize their memory and of course we have to mention the mmaker tool which which can yeah analyze your startup fils and then apply some tweaks automatically so let's just go through the process and see what happens so it did a bunch of reboots and it's now asking us if the system is working properly well we just going to say yes it is and yeah before man maker this was the amount of memory and now we have this much but remember we had EMS deactivated so let's have a look at the up files there you go so it added the emm386 line and this is the previous one from myself um for the device High and the load High commands it seems to have added a parameter here and let's look at the final result we have 6117 kilobytes which is exactly what we had before with my manual method but I have to admit my system is fairly straightforward I don't have any scuzzy or any other device drivers necessary and finally this was also the era of fancy boot menus and this is my contribution to the Retro PC Community those of you who have been following me for a while you know this boot menu very well it's part of the msdos starter pack you can download it from my website and yeah it sets you up with a nice boot menu where you can choose between expanded extended and conventional memory the first three options give you Mouse and CD ROM driver the next three options remove the optical dis driver and then finally without Mouse without Optical disk drivers and the option conventional memory only apparently there are some games out there if they don't find MS DOS in the conventional memory they freak out they think oh this this is impossible where is dos and then will not run I'm not aware of exactly which games fall under that category if you know please leave a comment down below so yeah this is what I use so far every game that I've come across and tested has been working with this boot menu just fine on a range of machines not just on a penum 2 also on a 386 486 Alon 64 you name it and and I've been uh yeah I got good feedback as well so it's sort of has stood the test of time and has been put through its Paces by you guys out there we do have some good news more modern games like Doom or descent they use what's called a 32-bit dos extender dos 4gw you might have seen it in the splash screen when you load up a game and that let's the software use the entire amount of RAM on a 386 or higher processor so guys to summarize this situation in the beginning things just worked the 640 KOB of conventional memory well that was all you needed and also the late era of Dos games also everything just worked because they used 32-bit dos extenders it is this transition period in between where the developers the software pushed the limits and demanded more and more memory and yeah the industry wasn't quite just ready yet I do hope you found this video interesting and helpful and that terms like conventional memory and expanded extended memory as well as loading Doss into the high memory area and loading device drivers into the high memory I hope it cleared up some of the confusion and do check out my mistos stter pack I put it together for beginners but also for people that do know how to edit config fars and auto exic batch for but it's just yeah another barrier that stops us from enjoying these classic fantastic dos retro games I do want to hear from you about your experience with M maker my personal experience was well it didn't really do too much sometimes you even got a worse outcome so I always tweaked things manually and my motto is less is more so I like a lean system also if you're using Windows 98 and Ms 7.1 the memory requirements are a little bit higher so Ms 6.22 will have a smaller memory footprint meaning it will give you more conventional memory without any tweaking so there you have it I hope you found the video interesting leave your dos memory stories Down Below in the comments I will check your comments Saturday morning with a cup of coffee and it's something I really look forward to and treasure and that's it for this one thank you so much for watching and I shall see you soon with another one\n"