Playing a ancient DOS game

[John]

When I bought a XP computer (emachines 1860) two years ago I was very
disappointed that I couldn't play my favorite game "Masters of Orion". It
said it needed at least 1024bytes of expanded memory, and no settings would
help. A number of people on the inet said they hadn't succeeded either, so
I settled for playing ocassionally on my laptop.

Last week I bought a new computer (emachines 2880) and just for the heck of
it I tried MOO on it. After giving it some expanded memory and setting it
for W95 compatibility, it ran fine. I tried the old computer again,
thinking maybe SP2 helped somehow, but it gives the same old error message.

Why on earth can I play on one XPhome system, but not on another?

 

[Guest]

I'm not sure if this is related, but I have had a few old programs complain
about not enough memory - once after I added 512MB to my machine!
I found that changing my pagefile size (up or down) sometimes would make these
programs work. I think that some older programs may calculate the available
memory using too small of an integer size, then the number overflows, and
looks like a smaller number.

For what it is worth, my son plays MOO on XP Pro, with 256MB of memory.
I can't remember for sure, not having time to play such games anymore myself,
but MOO was a DOS program - MOO2 has a DOS and a Windows version on the same
CD (and is complicated enough to look more like work than fun to me).

|When I bought a XP computer (emachines 1860) two years ago I was very
|disappointed that I couldn't play my favorite game "Masters of Orion". It
|said it needed at least 1024bytes of expanded memory, and no settings would
|help. A number of people on the inet said they hadn't succeeded either, so
|I settled for playing ocassionally on my laptop.
|
|Last week I bought a new computer (emachines 2880) and just for the heck of
|it I tried MOO on it. After giving it some expanded memory and setting it
|for W95 compatibility, it ran fine. I tried the old computer again,
|thinking maybe SP2 helped somehow, but it gives the same old error message.
|
|Why on earth can I play on one XPhome system, but not on another?
|
|

 

[Bruce Chambers]

When I bought a XP computer (emachines 1860) two years ago I was very
disappointed that I couldn't play my favorite game "Masters of Orion". It
said it needed at least 1024bytes of expanded memory, and no settings would
help. A number of people on the inet said they hadn't succeeded either, so
I settled for playing ocassionally on my laptop.

Last week I bought a new computer (emachines 2880) and just for the heck of
it I tried MOO on it. After giving it some expanded memory and setting it
for W95 compatibility, it ran fine. I tried the old computer again,
thinking maybe SP2 helped somehow, but it gives the same old error message.

Why on earth can I play on one XPhome system, but not on another?

A shot in the dark: Does the older machine happen to have a Celeron
CPU, while the newer machine, on which the game runs, have something
better? I have seen early Celeron machines balk at properly running
older, DOS-based apps that required extended memory, while Pentium
machines would run the apps without problem.

--

Bruce Chambers

Help us help you:



You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having
both at once. - RAH