Oh man, my fondest early memories with computers was modifying the autoexec.bat and config.sys files so I could play DOS games. I can only describe the feeling of finally figuring it out and getting a certain game to work as pure joy.
Conversely, the feeling when I changed something incorrectly (without backups of the original file, of course) and the system error'd out during boot - sheer panic.
did you load himem.sys? how about emm386.exe?
does your sound card have an OPL3 or the OPL4 MIDI chip?
Does your trident VESA card on the ISA slot have 1MB VRAM?
stacker, drivespace or doublespace? choices!
I just bought me a Seagate medalist 1-Gigabyte hard drive. Should I make it a master or a slave on the ATA bus?
Make sure the Turbo button is pressed, if Doom is slow to load!
Had so much with my friends while in high-school trying to figure out what kind of weird graphics mode this cool game called "Scorched Earth" used... It wasn't 320x200 :)
Mode X and related: programming VGA registers to do what int 10h mode 13h didn't offer. Bonus points for flipping video pages or cycling the palette as to not cause tearing.
Oh man, those IRQ nightmares! Please don't mention those extended memory settings or I will go into my basement to look for my MEMMAKER notes on how to (maybe) get a game going...
Just boot one in your browser! https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games Yes these are real copies of MS-DOS games running in MS-DOS in a JS emulator in your browser. Some of them have crack screens, but some of them are running from magnetic maps of the disk, with original copy protection schemes intact.
