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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Sweet DOS memories. I could probably still remember how to write CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files that wring out every possible byte of <640K memory so that Ultima VII would run. (This game had a home-grown memory manager which required an obscene ~620K of so-called "real" memory while also requiring certain drivers that ate into that real memory, making it difficult to run the game without manually customizing the DOS startup command files.)

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I always had the same experience getting TIE Fighter to run. Mostly it was a combination of LH's and DOS=HIGH,UMB which did the trick.

That and a trial and error process of reordering CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT entries along with interactive boot which always reminded me of that scene from Apollo 13 when they are trying to determine the powerup sequence for the command module.

As soon as I saw this I was going to post about AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS, the joy and pain of which were only surpassed by the hardware jumpers that occasionally tagged along. Long live DOS!

ahem.

LOADHIGH=c:\mouse\mouse.sys

On my PC it required something else, making the boot files not quite that trivial. Maybe it was the sound card, or maybe it was due to the oddball MicroChannel bus and ESDI hard disk on that IBM PS/2 -- I can't remember.

I'm glad we don't have to do that stuff anymore just to play a game.

No, it was DEVICEHIGH= in config.sys to load .SYS drivers, and LOADHIGH (without an equals sign) in autoexec.bat to load an .EXE.

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