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386 protected mode was not tied to 'boot from floppy'. It was more of a do these set of instructions and you can flip the cpu in the 386 mode. Many of us had an extra boot floppy that would not load xms or ems which would conflict with protected mode (as it wanted the same memory as those extenders). I personally used a 4dos script that would turn things on and off with a set of prompts if needed. Special boot floppies were pretty much the norm for other systems though as they used it as a form of copy protection. Many of the later origin games would flip themselves into protected mode so that special path was needed. It may have been one of the first as that was right around the time many games started using protected mode (ultima 7 was another if I remember correctly). As memory prices has started to fall a bit and and it was 'only 150 dollars per MB'

Many commercial games in the 80s were booted from floppy. That wasn’t unusual. What sucked about this game was it used DOS but in a weird way, incompatible with every other DOS hack, so you had to set up your boot menus specifically for this game.

Winter games by EPYX booted directly to the game, ignoring DOS.