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Ultima 7:2 taught me more about DOS memory management than anything else. Had to handcraft a menu-driven autoexec.bat / config.sys monster to get that thing going. HIMEM.SYS ... oh the memories.

A single KB too much in a mouse driver and you were unable to start the game. Oh you want sound? Roland MT-32 or Soundblaster Pro? But how will you load all those drivers in those first 640K of RAM?

Shivers...

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I remember having specific 'boot disks' with the right autoexec.bat / config.sys combinations for a bunch of different Origin Systems games. I know I definitely had them for Ultima VII, and Wing Commander Privateer. Another amazing game I put many, many hours into.

I ended up doing the same thing, eventually I had a menu which would boot a minimal DOS, one with all the bells and whistles, one for going straight to doss hell, another for Windows, games, etc. Cool that others independently arrived at this solution.

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