Heck, the video card's DOS 2D performance may become the bottleneck. Your CPU will matter a bit more, as anything under 300mhz may stutter on more complex scenes.
#Ms dos 7.1 boot disk drivers
There's also free VESA drivers available in some situations (Matrox is notable for having some third party software available for free).Īnd don't forget, that as fast as your video card is, in Windows, it may seem rather pitiful in DOS, when it's just used as a dumb framebuffer card. In theory, every modern video card is capable of it as a legacy support item, but as it's a legacy support item, it's probable that most everyone's phased it out over the last 3 or 4 generations of video cards.
#Ms dos 7.1 boot disk driver
Check your manufacturer's website and see if there's anything there in terms of VESA driver support. SciTech's Display Doctor is a good start, but that's a time limited shareware. I've even run all the Ultimas, save 7-8 (they have their own memory manager) as well as Ultima Underworld 1 & 2 and all the DOS Wing Commanders.ĭepending upon your video card and the video bios, you may or may not need a VESA driver for it, or you may have to fake it with a generic driver to get it to run old 2D games that rely on VESA. I've played everything from The Ancient Art Of War (At Sea as well) to Omega to various copies of Battletech to Doom 1/2 to WolfenStein 3D. You'll need the CTLOAD program from Creative Labs then, especially for the MSCDEX.EXE file or for the IDE CDROM Driver file.
#Ms dos 7.1 boot disk windows
You can optionally just make an autoexec.bat and config.sys and put it on a boot floppy with appropriate sound/Vesa drivers, just for games booting, or you can even make the "RESTART IN MSDOS" menu option mean something for you, by adjusting the DOSSTART.BAT batch file which will act as an autoexec.bat file when restarting in MSDOS mode (sort of like putting windows in hibernation or task switching out of it, but not really). It's called CTLOAD.COM or CTLOAD.EXE and can be found on their ftp space. SYS (usually driver files, like mouse.sys, etc) files at the command line or within the autoexec.bat file. Then again, I'm an old DOS wonk who actually made a boot menu and didn't use the Win9x boot menu.ĭOS 7 and later is useful in how much stuff you can load in the HMA, and expanded memory areas that would normally take up conventional memory space. com files being no larger than 64k in size.īTW, I've had very good luck running all sorts of old DOS games in a DOS 7.1 clean boot (with config.sys and autoexec.bat statements). One very key difference is how with Win95 (DOS 7.x depending upon your version of Win9x, also reported as DOS 6.95) that the file breaks MS's rule about. Besides, DOS 6.22 is only FAT16 with means you can't have a harddrive bigger than 2 gigs without splitting it into different partitions. And if you were to install, lets say, DOS 6.22 - then you have just installed a different version of DOS on your machine, and maybe this would affect Win98. I have one harddrive with DOS, and the other with Linux/Win98SE. I had a few problems with memory with newer PC's, but it can all be worked out.Īnd about the Dual-booting, I have never tried that. If it requires 200K of BASE, you better make sure you got it. I'm not sure how much that Lucas Art game uses, but remember, in old DOS games you usually only have 640K of DOS memory to work with.
Use the MEM command in DOS to check your free base memory. If your running it in pure DOS, your going to need a few files, like MOUSE.COM. I have tried the emulator, and it works fine (for Duke3D). Although, it could work if you have SB LIVE with the SB16 emulator for DOS. I would say the best bet is to use a SB16 card.