jxb@rayssdb.ray.com (Jack Bell) (03/10/90)
I have recently purchased a PS/2 50z for home use. The system has Windows 286, hDC Express, Windows Manager and several applications. I did not purchase any additional memory as there was no funds available :-( At the time I felt the 1Mb would surely be enough as I had been using an Apple ][+ with only 64k. I am trying to make this system very user friendly for my kids, preferably everything should be able to run without exiting from the menu system. My kids are presently only only using the computer to run games and I have been partially successful in getting these to run under Windows by carefully editing the .PIF files. I have had difficulty with one game in particular- Where in Time is Carmen SanDiego. There simply was not enough memory available to run in the Windows environment. To make matters worse it still would not operate even after exiting both Windows and the shell, even though there was well over the recommended 512k memory requirement available. The only success I have had in executing this program was when both the smartdrv.sys and himem.sys drivers were removed from config.sys and the program was run from the C: prompt. I feel that this is an unacceptable solution as a cache driver is really necessary. I tried using ibmcache.sys which uses only 8k vs the 24k used by smartdrv.sys (BTW himem will not work with ibmcache) with no luck. One possibility might be to remove PRINT and GRAPHICS which are resident in memory (probably called by command.com although I am not sure). I do not know how to do this and have found no help in the manual. At this point I would appreciate any suggestions. What would be real nice is a compact program which when called by windows would clear all possible memory and then call the application desired. When the application was complete this program should restore Windows to its previous state. Is such a program available? Thanks in advance.
dlow@hpspcoi.HP.COM (Danny Low) (03/15/90)
>I have had difficulty with one game in particular- Where in Time >is Carmen SanDiego. There simply was not enough memory available >to run in the Windows environment. Most games and educational programs for kids on the PC do not acknowledge the existence of Windows, extended or expanded memory or TSRs. They often require a bare bones MSDOS systems. Many of them take over the keyboard and cannot run under Windows. IOW, expect most games and educational programs to work ONLY in a straight DOS environment. Expect problems with TSRs such as extended/expanded memory managers and disk caches. Danny Low "Question Authority and the Authorities will question You" Valley of Hearts Delight, Silicon Valley HP SPCD dlow%hpspcoi@hplabs.hp.com ...!hplabs!hpspcoi!dlow