DOS nostalgia?

I’ve been getting nostalgic for DOS lately. Well, certain DOS games *cough* Railroad Tycoon *cough*.

One of my coworkers’ wives is nostalgic for ’80s boy bands whose name I refuse to mention, so there certainly are worse things for me to be nostalgic about. Sure, DOS is terrible, but not that terrible.I’m using an old 128MB compact flash card in a cheap CF-IDE adapter. While 128 megs isn’t a lot, it’s adequate if you’re not going to have Windows and Windows apps loaded. After all, you can get all the DOS you’ll ever need for game playing in less than 1.5 megs. Even still, I’ll probably pick up a bigger card the next time I order stuff from Newegg. A 4 gig card is cheap, and to DOS, 4 gigs is huge.

DOS boots to a C prompt in about five seconds off the CF card, and a good chunk of that is the CD-ROM driver scanning the IDE channels for drives. The system takes a lot longer to POST than it does to boot.

The system itself is an old Micron Pentium II-266. Severe overkill, but I hear Railroad Tycoon Deluxe really wants a fast CPU. Plus, my 486 is missing in action right now anyway.

Now that I have the system running, I need to hunt down drivers for the system’s Sound Blaster card. Then I’ll get Railroad Tycoon Deluxe loaded, and then all I’ll have to do is find a little time to play it. That last step will probably be the hardest part.

If the games I want to play don’t like the P2 (unlikely but possible), I’ll just dig out a Pentium 75 or a 486 from somewhere. That won’t be a huge setback, since I’ll have everything I need gathered up to build the system at that point.

What to do when Windows breaks

Every once in a while I get a question like this one, which showed up Thursday night on this page:
I did a stupid thing last night. A friend thought I might need to upgrade my Windows 98SE to Windows ME, but didnt get me an upgrade version, but the full version. Through the installation process, I did not copy the unistall files to my hard drive as I didnt think I would need to uninstall, plus I wanted to get rid of all elements of any old system files, as they were the ones causing me problems (errors in cd-rom line 2, 3 4 etc)…
Now, my computer stays in dos mode, and says that windows cannot run on ms dos version 8.00!?
Please help!? I need to wipe my hard drive and start again. How do I do that?

Please help

This question opens up a huge can of worms, like whether Windows ME really was an upgrade over 98SE, but in this case it sounds like it’s too late for that argument. How do you install Windows cleanly?

Here’s what I do. At a DOS prompt, I enter this command:

REN WINDOWS WINBAK

This gets your old Windows directory out of the way, but without deleting it. This is important because you might want to harvest stuff out of there: IE bookmarks and fonts are the two most likely things.

Next, because these files under any 32-bit Windows cause nothing but problems:

DEL C:\CONFIG.SYS
DEL C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT

If you’re really paranoid, rename them instead:

REN C:\CONFIG.SYS C:\CONFIG.BAK
REN C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT C:\AUTOEXEC.BAK

Next, start Windows setup. Run it off a CD–grab a boot floppy from bootdisk.com if you don’t have one–or the CAB files might, if you’re lucky, be on your hard drive. The standard place OEMs put it is C:\Windows\Options\Cabs. We just renamed Windows, so you can try these commands:

CD \WINBAK\OPTIONS\CABS
SETUP

That’ll start up Windows Setup for whatever version came with your computer.

If the directory’s not there, or Setup.exe isn’t there, you’re stuck using the CD. Boot off the CD, or use the bootdisk if the CD isn’t bootable.

Run Windows setup, and setup will say it found an installation in C:\WINBAK and ask if you want to upgrade it. SAY NO!!!!! (I feel so strongly about this that I’m tempted to use the dreaded blink tag, but I’ll spare you.) It’ll ask where you want to install. Say good ol’ C:\WINDOWS, and you’re on your way to a fresh, clean build.

Optimizing BIOSes and optimizing DOS

Optimizing the BIOS. Dustin Cook sent in a link to Adrian’s Rojak Pot, at www.adriansrojakpot.com , which includes a BIOS tweaking guide. It’s an absolute must-read. I have a few minor quibbles with a couple of the things he says, particularly about shadowing and caching your ROMs with Windows 9x. He says you shouldn’t do it. He’s right. He says you shouldn’t do it because Microsoft says not to do it with Windows NT, and Windows 9x “shares the same Win32 architecture.” It does and it doesn’t, but that’s flawed logic. Shadowing ROMs isn’t always a bad thing; on some systems that eats up some usable memory and on others it doesn’t, depending on the chipset and BIOS it uses. But it’s pointless because Windows doesn’t use the BIOS for anything, unless you’re in safe mode. Caching ROMs makes very little sense; there’s only so much caching bandwidth to go around so you should spend it on caching memory that’s actually being used for something productive. So who cares about architecture, you shouldn’t cache and shadow your ROMs because Windows will ignore it one way or the other, so those facilities are better spent elsewhere. The same thing is true of Linux.

Still, in spite of this minor flaw I found in a couple of different spots, this is an invaluable guide. Perfect BIOS settings won’t make a Pentium-90 run like a Pentium III, but poor BIOS settings certainly can make a Pentium III run more like a 386DX-40. Chances are your BIOS settings aren’t that bad, but they can probably use some improvement. So if you want the best possible performance from your modern PC, visit Adrian’s. If you want to optimize your 386 or 486 or low-end Pentium, visit the site I mentioned yesterday.

Actually, it wouldn’t be a half-bad idea to take the downloadable versions of both guides, print them, and stick them in a binder for future reference. You’ll never know when you might want to take them with you.

Optimizing DOS again. An awful lot of system speed is psychological. I’d say maybe 75% of it is pure psychology. It doesn’t matter so much whether the system really is fast, just as long as it feels fast. I mentioned yesterday keyboard and screen accelerators. Keyboard accelerators are great for people like me who spend a lot of time in long text files, because you can scroll through them so much faster. A keyboard accelerator makes a big difference in how an old DOS system feels, and it can improve the responsiveness of some DOS games. (Now I got your attention I’m sure.)

Screen accelerators are a bit more of a stretch. Screen accelerators intercept the BIOS calls that write to the screen and replace them with faster, more efficient code. I’d estimate the speedup is anywhere from 10 to 50 percent, depending on how inefficient the PC’s BIOS is and whether it’s shadowing the BIOS into RAM. They don’t speed up graphics at all, just text mode, and then, only those programs that are using the BIOS–some programs already have their own high-speed text routines they use instead. Software compatibility is potentially an issue, but PC power users have been using these things since at least 1985, if not longer, so most of the compatibility issues have long since been fixed.

They only take a couple of kilobytes of memory, and they provide enough of a boost for programs that use the BIOS that they’re more than worth it. With keyboard and screen accelerators loaded in autoexec.bat, that old DEC 386SX/20 feels an awful lot faster. If I had a copy of a DOS version of Microsoft Word, I could use it for writing and it wouldn’t cramp my style much.