I've been trying to run old dos 5&6 software under windows 98, but the dos 7 is incompatible with either the ems ram allocation or the dos4gw format

I have Windows 95 and the bulk of the programs I run are true DOS ones (games, two different compilers, Lotus 1-2-3, Word, etc.), so I've found a few ways to get them going. I hope one of these works for you, too: The MS-DOS prompt from within Windows is good, and has always worked for me- save once; but that was quite an exceptional program and a long, long story. You can allocate EMS memory for a DOS program running within Win console mode at least two different ways. The way I do it, and this gives evey DOS prog the same memory settings, is to add the lines: DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.exe 4096 RAM to you Config.SYS file. Himem.SYS gives DOS access to extended memory. Emm386 will then use the some extended memory (in this case ~4MB) to simulate expanded memory for you DOS programs. You'll probably want to alter the amout of "expanded" memory one way or the other to better suit your needs. Another way is to create a .PIF file for your DOS executable (Windows often does this automatically when you execute one), right click on the .PIF file and bring up the Properties menu. There are settings for EMS Memory under one of the tabs. This only works for a DOS program when run under Win9x, though. I also recommend you get a copy of the Waite Group's MS-DOS Bible by Steve Simirin. The edition I read was over ten years old, so it didn't have anything much to say about Windows. Alot of good DOS info, though, including a good chapter on Expanded (!) memory.

... if you do set up config.sys as described by Oscar, you may need to add the line: DOS=HIGH,UMB to fully activate himem and emm386 - if you leave off the "4096" then the amount of EMS won't be limited... shouldn't be a problem tho' - 4 Megs was a LOT of mem for those old games. Can't say how well this will work with DOS extenders, such as dos4gw... but I've run the old DOS-based DooM on a '98 machine (it uses dos4gw) with no trouble. You could use an old 6.22 boot disk... but this probably won't recognize anything on C: (FAT32) - maybe a Win98 startup disk? Lots of things to try...

Recently i've been trying to play many dos games under windows 98. These included warcraft 2 and tie fighter. I had tried all of the above ideas, but none of them seemed to work. Ive also tried starting up the computer with a boot disk without loading my sound drivers or cd rom drivers. This worked slightly better than before, but after getting into warcraft 2 for a few seconds, it would still crash showing "dos 4gw Professional error". I can get them working on my old 486 but not my windows 98 based machine. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I have tried the above changes to the config.sys to get some emm386 memory for an old simulator. I am using windows me but when I run the application it says that the program cannot allocate expanded memory. Nothing crashes but it just wont work. Any help of this issue is appreciated. Bill.

well, I,ve been trying to get bioforge running on my win98, but all i get when i start the exec is a check of memory , and when the check comes to fonts (??) it gives a strange error message. dos 4gw says it cannot start an appropriate file for the selected executable . I am also trying to start crusader:no remorse. but it requires some VESA videocard standard that is not supported nowadays I guess. Any ideas ? crusader no regret is running nicely , though. How come ??