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Comment by Freebytes | Hacker News Reader

I had a hard time getting Doom to run on my 486. I only had something like 4MB of RAM if I recall correctly so I had to restart my computer, edit the AUTOEXEC.BAT to remove options that I would use to load Windows, and then boot back into DOS to launch DOOM each time I wanted to play it to get that last bit of memory I needed. Then, when I wanted to run Windows, I had to edit the HIMEM.SYS stuff to get it running again. (I was a teenager with no Internet access. I have no idea how I figured out this stuff or where I got information from.)

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"norton commander" shell had a user defined menu where you could create short scripts, basically just a chain of DOS commands. As a fellow teenager with no Internet access, I've made a "game" submenu which replaced normal autoexec.bat with a slim one curated for a particular game and rebooted computer right into the game. After you exit the game it'll replace autoexec.bat with the backup of normal one and reboot again back into norton commander.

I have no idea why I needed that level of automation, of course.

My friend had a 486 (We only had a 386), but it would play doom really well.

However, the first step of any gaming session was to reboot the machine with the boot floppy in, which had the right boot settings for gaming performance.

Starting with DOS 6.0 (which came out before DOOM), there was an option to create a menu where you could choose different CONFIG.SYS (and AUTOEXEC.BAT via a variable) options. No need to edit it every time or use a floppy just to get different settings![0]

[0] http://smallvoid.com/article/dos-multiple-configurations.htm...

I recently installed DOS 6.22 on an old laptop. By old, I mean a core2duo with 4GB of ram. It was hilarious to me that I needed to google the correct settings to use to get a game that requires 4MB to work on a machine with 4GB.

My actual goal was to setup QBasic for my son, which I did-- but he thought it was stupid and refused to even let me show him how to code a Hello World app on it. :(

I'm sorry this happened to you. If you were my dad, I would have thought you showing me QBASIC would have been the coolest thing ever.

It kind of reminds me of my dad when he built our first whitebox 486 PC in 1992. Getting to sit on his lap while we messed around in DOS and some games from the era really stuck with me forever. He also loved to mess around in a BBS and would show me how cool it was that we could communicate with other systems at a long distance via modem. :)

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