A few months ago, out motherboard got fried in a powersurge, so now we only have DOS, I'm not sure which year or version. Anyways, since this is all we have we play a lot of games. Recently, I got two DOS games and they played fine when I tried them here at the library, but when I got home, the words were in gibberish instead of English. How do I go about changing the language or solving this problem?

- Trina

Trina - no offense, but it's extremely difficult to provide advice based on such vague information.

What OS were you running prior to this 'powersurge'?

A 'fried' motherboard typically results in a dead computer, not a reversion to DOS (or DOS-like Operating System).

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak
out and remove all doubt.

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We WERE running Windows 98SE (on a rebuilt computer that we bought secondhand, thus no startup disks or anything) before the surge. After the surge, my husband spend a week trying to get something working and he was finally able to get dos shell up and running with the use of a DOS startup/installation floppy. So now everything we do is in DOSshell...

- Trina

Ok - you're running your machine from a DOS bootdisk - it's not a shell, it's an Operating System (no, really).

Possibly Windows could be restored on that machine - even without the installation CD - but that's an issue for the Win9x forum.

Still can't advise you concerning these games though. Are you running them from the hard drive, CD or floppy disk? If they're on a floppy disk or the hard drive, likely the disks or files are corrupted - if they're on a CD, your CD drive may be dirty or have other issues.

What are the actual games?

Any error messages?

Thinking - it's a habit.

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The games are a couple of games I got from dosgames.com - wordmax, wordle, and one more I can't remember right now - and they played fine when I ran them from the library. At home, I put them in C:\ drive and tried and while the games play, the language is either garbled or not in English. The games don't come with language options and I can't find any information on language commands for DOS. Also, twice I removed and then readded the games to the computer, to no avail. Thanx for any tips you have for me...BTW, we are running DOSshell from the actual computer, not from the floppy; I don't know what my hubby did, but he did something...

- Trina

Oh, sure, it's fairly simple (& preferable) to run DOS or Dosshell from the hard disk.

It would seem that either the floppy you loaded the games from has errors, or else there could be a problem with the computer's floppy drive itself - they can get dirty or misaligned.
Another possibility is that there are errors on the hard drive - especially in light of the recent crash.

Shouldn't be a language issue, but check in config.sys on c:\ (a text file) in case something odd is loading .

Wouldn't hurt to run scandisk or a recent version of Norton Disk Doctor (for DOS) on the HDD and perhaps on the floppies too.

Once the hard drive is determined to be error free, you may want to check and see if the Windows installation files are on the disk.

If theres a directory (folder) named

c:\windows\options\cabs

or

c:\win98

you may be able to run the setup program and reinstall (might need a product key though)

Hope that helps.

Thinking - it's a habit.

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Thanx! I'll try that out!

- Trina