Firstly - many thanks to all those offering help in this thread. It has digressed somewhat from the OP but I hope the suggested tips will help other 'newbs', I will certainly revisit here to refresh my memory (no pun intended), follow links when I have more time etc. Thanks Robert Riebisch for your link to your "pause" program - so heartening to see so many other DOS applications you have on offer, and the same goes for other programmers all lending a shoulder to keep improving the quality of the user's DOS experience. I hope to test it out soon, thank you. Rugxulo I'm going to again try to condense my general responses to you without specific re-quoting - but if I miss a point of reply feel free to remind me. Given that I am using a non-standard system for games testing I'll try to answer to my best knowledge - I haven't been trying to iron out the kinks definitively, and will have to return to the "intended domain" for these software - the Toshiba Satellite Pro 430CDS with Soundblaster Pro emulation, 48MB RAM max etc. Already I have found that GrandMaster Chess, found to be a tall order on the newer machine (2GB RAM, etc), works straight off the bat in ye olde Toshie. So, as I think you were getting at - it isn't the availability of RAM and its memory allocations- conventional, UMA, EMS etc - but what the old software thinks it is looking for and if it doesn't find, it borks in a huff. I still get strange JEMMEX memory allocation errors on occasion - even when I've gone with the EMM386 + Share option, but I gather JEMMEX is being used pretty much like Memmaker might have been, in earlier DOS incarnations. National Lampoon's Chess Maniac gives XMS errors, so I'll be looking up on that one with the strategies you've outlined. Worth a separate thread on its own, so I'll divert other memory management questions thataway... You also described the best way to use 'unzipping' within DosZip - I just assumed that the "decompress" function served as a bonafide unzip function, but it didn't - highlighting my inability to use manuals and try to work things out "intuitively". I found that DosZip's "View" function is much better for reading game documentation that the memory-intensive "edit" - my mistake of old habit.
So, to return to the OP, I thought after weeding out multiple zip copies, junk games etc I'd clean up the USB (allocated as Drive B) with a defrag. Started well, but froze completely in mid-process and needed a hard reset. On rebooting, attempted defrag met with "Error, Disk checking failed" and no go - but so did attempts to defrag C (sd-card, also FAT32). Is FAT32 support still to come for FreeDOS defrag, as I see it is still lacking for ChkDsk? I used MHDD32 from UBCD and no problems were found in either drive, so I guess I'm wondering that for *pure* DOS-game roles, the respective drives are best formatted as FAT16? Might well be the source of the hiccup I'm having with Access icon libraries, but I'm only guessing. Thanks PS your notes on conflict issues is well made, but I'm more inclined to resume my experiments testing my download packages, older hardware environs etc - and finding also that many of the games I've sourced as "DOS" are intended for Win95 settings, and those are the first flies in the ointment I'm prepared to tackle at present, given my sledgehammer methods... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Free Next-Gen Firewall Hardware Offer Buy your Sophos next-gen firewall before the end March 2013 and get the hardware for free! Learn more. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sophos-d2d-feb _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
