rec.autos.simulators

The only way to fix this is reboot from floppy and delete autexec.bat and rename
your backup copy of it to autoexec.bat. Other than that, I like WIN95 better
than 3.1.

There has been some mixed results on this one.  However, in June Papyrus
promises an upgraded ICR2 for Win95 that should take care of part of the
problem.  However, for NASCAR & ICR2 I have found that you will need at
least 16meg to get them to work in Win95.  I still don't recommend it
though.  It's best to "shutdown" to MS-Dos to run them.  You shouldn't
have any trouble running them if you restart Win95 in Dos mode.

Even trying to run them in MS-DOS I ran into problems since I am using
DriveSpace3.  I didn't have enough memory to run them until I created a
boot disk which didn't load the DriveSpace drivers/bin file.  Once I
upgraded to 16meg memory, I no longer have this problem.
--
**************************** Michael E. Carver *************************
     Upside out, or inside down...False alarm the only game in town.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=<[ /./.  [-  < ]>=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

by Mark Hettler

When I was considering upgrading to Windows 95, I had only one motivation:
context switching. With four kids, someone was always playing a game on the
computer when I needed to check a budget balance in my home finance program or
dash off a quick e-mail note, and since most of their games couldn't be played in
command windows under Windows 3.x, they were always out in DOS. So I had to
either wait until later or make them quit in the middle of a game. With Windows 95,
which was supposed to run all the DOS apps that you couldn't run under the old
Windows, I wouldn't have to do either. I could just ask them to stop for a minute, switch
back to Windows and do what I needed to do, then let them pick up where they left off.

Imagine my dismay, then, when my neighbors told me they had upgraded to Windows
95, and they had to use boot disks for all their DOS games. Of course, we know now
that that's not true. Check out Vernon Crandall's article, What Do I Do With All My
DOS Games, in last month's issue, to learn how to set up icons to get you into DOS
mode from within Windows 95. But while doing things Vernon's way saves my kids the
hassles of fooling around with boot disks, it still doesn't give me context switching. The
computer restarts in DOS mode, devoting all the resources of the computer to a single
DOS session, with no option to switch out. What I really need to do is run those games
from a Command Window within Windows 95, without restarting in DOS mode.

I'd say about a third to a half of the DOS multimedia games at our house require DOS
mode. You can tell a program that requires DOS mode because when you start it from
within Windows 95, it displays a message saying it requires DOS mode. There's not
much you can do about these except what Vernon told you to do last month. The rest
are perfectly happy to run in a regular command window within Windows 95, but
require varying combinations of extended memory (XMS), expanded memory (EMS),
and real memory. I found I could configure my system so some games would work, but
others wouldn't, and if I fixed it so those that weren't working would now work, the ones
that used to work wouldn't. So I want to talk a little about how I resolved these issues.

When I upgraded to Windows 95, my CONFIG.SYS file included the following two
lines:

DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE NOEMS I=E000-EFFF

The first line was added by Windows 3.1 setup and makes XMS memory available.
Without it, no matter how much memory you had in your system, you would only be
able to access 640 KB and Windows wouldn't run. The second line was added by
MemMaker. It loads an EMS memory manager, but the NOEMS parameter tells it not
to load any EMS memory. Instead, it allows you to load certain device drivers, and
DOS itself, into upper memory, freeing up as much of the lower 640 KB as possible
for memory-hungry DOS programs. MemMaker does this by putting statements like
DOS=HIGH, DOS=UMB and DEVICEHIGH= into CONFIG.SYS, and LH(LoadHigh)
into AUTOEXEC.BAT.

This gives you all the real memory your DOS programs are likely to need, with all your
memory above 1 MB (i.e., 7 MB on an 8 MB system, 15 MB on a 16 MB system, etc.)
accessible as XMS memory. That should be enough for anything, right? Wrong! A lot
of your DOS games don't like XMS, they want EMS. Taking the NOEMS parameter
out of the EMM386.EXE statement, and replacing it with a RAM parameter will solve
that problem, but it's not the ideal configuration for Windows.

So back when we were running Windows 3.x, we made boot disks for those kinds of
games.

When I first upgraded to Windows 95, I naively thought it would work like OS/2 Warp,
and allow me to configure the memory allocation for each application, designating
whatever amount I needed for real, for XMS, and for EMS, out of the total system
memory. It didn't work. I found that if I had the NOEMS parameter in the EMM386.EXE
statement in CONFIG.SYS, EMS would not be available to me at all. Taking the
EMM386.EXE statement out of CONFIG.SYS altogether gave me the freedom to
allocate EMS or XMS to individual applications as I pleased, but now drivers we being
loaded into real memory instead of high memory at startup, and I didn't have enough
real memory for some games.

So I plugged in the EMM386.EXE statement from one of our boot disks:

DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE RAM 6144 I=E000-EFFF

This allocated 6 MB to EMS, which is the most any of our games wanted, and still
freed up enough real memory. But because I only have a total of 8 MB in the system, I
found that now the games that required XMS wouldn't work. At this point I thought I was
going to have to decide which configuration would accommodate the most games,
and relegate the rest to restarting in DOS mode. But after further experimenting, I hit
upon the following syntax:

DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE RAM=E000-EFFF

This allows allocating XMS or EMS to individual apps, but still leaves enough real
memory free. I'd recommend some variation of this syntax for anyone wanting to run
DOS games under Windows 95. The memory range (E000-EFFF) may not be right for
every system; you may have to experiment until you get one that's right for yours. But
I've found that except for the games I referred to earlier that explicitly require DOS
mode, I can run games that require XMS memory, games that require EMS memory,
and games that require lots of real memory, all from within Windows 95 without
restarting the system. I can context switch whenever I want, the kids don't have to quit
in the middle of games, and I don't to wait to do what I need to do. Life is good.

Mark Hettler works for National Software Testing Laboratories (NSTL) in Conshohocken, PA. where he
reviews software for the Software Digest Ratings Report. His main specialty is database software; he
has authored a number of in-depth comparative evaluations of SQL servers, client-server development
tools, and Windows databases. In his spare time he helps his four sons (ages 14, 12, 10, and 7) get

home page at http://www.nstl.com.

?1

Don't be shy of WIN95, it's an excellent product.
--
Mike Moxon

I installed IRC2 as recommended by the manual under Win95. It has run
flawlessly and has never crashed. Whenever I exit my machine reboots straight
back into Win95.

Regards

--
 _____ ________ __    __ __   |DM|   _______   __    
|_    \\  ____ \\ \   \ \\ \   ___  |  ____ \\_\ \'96
  \ \\ \\ \_ |/ \\ \/\/  \\ \  \_ \ \ \    \   __ \  
   \ \\ \\  _\ . \\  /\/\ \\ \   \ \ \ \   .\ \  \ \
   _\ -  \\ \__|\//  \\  \ \\ \_|\\ \_\ \__|\\ \  \ \
  |______/ \_____|\/\_\\  \_\\____\\__\\_____\\_\ |_|
          "668 : The Neighbour of the Beast"

     <<Kelly, You must have an unusual setup if this happens to you.
Windows95 allows you to have a unique autoexec.bat and config.sys for
every program you want to run in dos mode. Right click the icon, select
Properties | Program | Advanced | Specify a New MS Dos Configuration...
then edit to your heart's content.  With Win 95 you don't it isn't
essential to have an autoexec.bat in your root directory.>>

     I'll second that!!! I took both my autoexec.bat and config.sys and
hid them in my DOS directory rather than deleting them outright. I need
a small Autoexec.bat to load GO95 for my Diamond Stealth64 2meg VRAM
card (PCI bus) because, for some reason, the resolution under Windows
won't come up properly unless I load it (I have about 3/4" of black
screen off the left side... anyone know what's wrong?). I have the
proper driver loaded in Win95 (had to search for it off the CD...
Diamond Stealth64 VRAM PCI) and have the resolution set at 640x480.  

     <<I installed IRC2 as recommended by the manual under Win95. It has
run flawlessly and has never crashed. Whenever I exit my machine reboots
straight back into Win95.>>

     I attempted to actually play ICR2 while in Win95. NFS plays just
fine *in* Win95 (not DOS protected mode) but I play ICR, ICR2 and NASCAR
Racing in DOS protected mode with a custom autoexec.bat and config.sys
(the latter two in SVGA). I deleted my dosstart.bat, because I never
actually shutdown to DOS, but I may create a new one because I just
installed a new CD-Rom drive (Creative hex-speed) after mine went south.
     Nick

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#6 & #94 in the *real* quest for the Cup!!!
My home away from home... http://users.aol.com/ntotoro/122895.htm
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