MS-DOS? Wtf is that?

What do you do when you’ve got 4+ gigs of old school MS-Dos games and DosBox ( http://dosbox.sourceforge.net ) just doesn’t seem to cut it? Well, using ‘Bart’s Bootable Dos CD’ ( http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd/ ) as a base I started putting together a CD package which would make it a bit easier to play the games. I have an old Compaq lappy with a questionable hard drive which makes it perfect for testing… Oh and thanks to joeblackstilES for the Doscollection. I hope I can send a couple more games soon.

Using Bart’s system with some small tweaks I quickly set up a CD with ‘X-Com: UFO Defense’ on it for testing. I’ve already thrown Pkunzip 2.04g and UnArj into a utils directory on the CD. Upon booting the CD it creates a 32Mb RamDrive and leaves you at a Dos prompt (I might put together some sort of menu or something). From there it’s just a matter of typing:

pkunzip -d .gamesx-com.zip q:x-com

Then just change over to the Q drive (that’s the RamDrive) change directory to x-com and run ufo.bat.

There are still quite a few things to consider. For instance, with X-Com the save games are kept in the X-Com directory which as you can guess are destroyed on shutdown. So, saving right now is not an option. I could probably set something up to copy saves over to the C drive but you should hear the sound the hard drive is making right now. I wonder if I can pick up a cheap drive for it off Ebay. And then there is a game like ‘Sam And Max: Hit the Road’ which is hard coded it seems to save to C:SAM.CD (at least the version I have tested seems to be). I wonder if I can get around that using some Dos trickery? On a computer with a working C drive it wouldn’t be a problem but on the lappy it won’t cut it. I can probably get around it with the Dos command subst or just hex editing the exe.

It’s probably not worth the bother for most people but if I get bored maybe I’ll look further into it…