madmax559 on 9/3/2002 at 02:46
Hi all :)
finally managed to get the following working.
Ultima UW1 & 2 running off a small 3-1/2 " bootable mini cd rom.
& a few other games...xcom1 &2
heres how this works
the boot disc contains a basic boot loader & dos 6/7 in el torito format
it loads drivers as necessary & creates a 32mb ram disk
now you can load the game on the ram disk & play & simply save the save games
to a floppy
not perfect by any means but ive managed to get this running on every x86 machine
ive tried (sound doesnt work in all cases obviously)
so say if u were running nt/xp on ntfs all you would need to do is boot the cd
play the game, save if you wanted to & reboot...all without ever touching the harddisk
if people are interested please respond here & paste your autoexec/config.sys here
& what sound drivers
ideally id like to make it menu driven to accomodate different configs
ems/no ems sound drivers etc etc
lastly if anyone would like an faq i can create on as long as someone is willing to host it
cheers :)
pete
madmax559 on 17/3/2002 at 18:15
hey....
is someone gonna look at this & respond or not :)
anyone used freedos before ?
combine that & the above & we will have a free legal boot disk playable anywhere :)
Shadowcat on 18/3/2002 at 01:12
This sounds pretty cool.
I assume the game saves to the RAM disc, and you manually copy the save files to a floppy disc after you've quit the game?
madmax559 on 18/3/2002 at 06:24
yep saves to the ram disk.....& then u copy it
grin~~ its a 3-1/2" mini cdr with the following games on it
uw1/2 u7/8 xcom1/2 larry1/2/3/4
its worked great on every system so far...
now what i really need for people to post their
autoexec/config.sys & what sound card they use
i'd like to make it menu driven at boot up so you can select you sound
driver...mines an awe32
so the cd worked on that sys but on the others there was no sound but it loaed
up perfectly
if anyone know of a generic sound driver...if theres such a beast then that would help
too
Shadowcat on 18/3/2002 at 10:51
Okay, I have a SoundBlaster Live sound card, and the noteworthy portions of my config files are:
autoexec.bat:
Quote:
SET BLASTER=A240 I7 D1 H7 P330 T6
SET CTSYN=C:\WINDOWS
C:\PROGRA~1\CREATIVE\SBLIVE\DOSDRV\SBEINIT.COM
config.sys
Quote:
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE
borzwazie on 18/3/2002 at 14:45
don't know if you have the space, but if you do, you should consider posting the iso image of that, make lotsa ppl happy :)
madmax559 on 18/3/2002 at 19:53
ill try & make the iso available soon as a download
heres how it will work
it will probably be based off of freedos & will be bootable
all you will need to do then is burn it to cd & multisession it
add another session to it with the game you want & it should work fine
this way its free & perfectly legal.
i dont know if the sound drivers are redistributable or not
so if anyone has more info then post here
