How to increase basic memory?

I have an old game that requires 560k basic memory. How do I achieve that? I heard I need to start in pure DOS, with no windows, how do I do that ? Thanx very much.

 

Depends on what operating system you use: generally there are two options

1.Before windows (asuming windows) starts press F8 to call up the start menu and select the dos mode (command prompt only I think) - you may find however that this wont allow your game to run - as you may not have the config.sys and autoexec.bat files setup for it

2.Create a dos boot disk and boot from that.

You may find however that (in particular for later versions of windows) some of the dos commands necessary to run a game may not be installed.

Finally if you have Windows XP have you tried running the game through that but setting the comatability mode necessary ? May take some experiementation but may work.

Good luck

 

Thanx so much for replying. I'm using Windows XP
Option 1 I only found safe mode with command prompt and it didn't work.
For Option2, after I boot it, I can't go to the C drive. I'm only in the A and B drives. What's the problem?
And what's the command to find out how much basic memory I have? Thanx in advance.

 

Type "mem" in a DOS command box to find that. The Windows XP DOS box generally should give you enough resources to run the program, but most older programs have problems with one or another part of it not being real DOS.
The best you can do is make sure you have FAT formatted drive somewhere (make a small partition if necessary) as real DOS cannot read NTFS. Then get out your old DOS 6 or 7 disk and install it there, make a bootdisk and run the game on that small partition.
Creating a dual boot with XP and Win98 might also work, but you also need a FAT drive for that.

So the answer to Option2 is you only have NTFS formatted drives, DOS can´t read them.

Of course, for really simple and small programs, just run them off a floppy. That only works for small and old (~<1990) programs though.

 

thanx, I'll try it.

 

you need to run DOS boot disk , with a little TSR ( terminate and stay resident) stuff as possible.