New 486 pc

[HercTNT]

blue i'm shocked you think the gravis gamepad is crap its not that bad no really, it works alright. i just picked one up brand new at goodwill. I"m pretty lucky, i managed to find alot of stuff in new condition. the only thing not new in my 486 is the board and cpu, everything else is sparkling hopefully i can get my hands on that printer. my daughters are into the retro stuff like me. I'm gonna install some classic kids games and painting programs for them to mess around with. my youngest loves simcity.

[BlueBMW]

blue i'm shocked you think the gravis gamepad is crap its not that bad no really, it works alright. i just picked one up brand new at goodwill. I"m pretty lucky, i managed to find alot of stuff in new condition. the only thing not new in my 486 is the board and cpu, everything else is sparkling hopefully i can get my hands on that printer. my daughters are into the retro stuff like me. I'm gonna install some classic kids games and painting programs for them to mess around with. my youngest loves simcity.

As a kid I loved the pad.  Nowadays, the D-pad just feels odd to me.  I guess I'm spoiled by the PCE pads etc    It will always have a nostalgic enjoyment for me though.

As far as good kids games...  KidPix is a fun old school painting program

[spenoza]

I do kinda like the thumbstick concept, though. There are some games where I've felt that works very well. I think a thumbstick would work pretty well with a fighting game, possibly.

[HercTNT]

I agree with that. the gravis worked well for the time. Blues right though, the d-pad is not the best. Kidpix....hmmmm.......gotta go find it, thanks for the info.

[BlueBMW]

I agree with that. the gravis worked well for the time. Blues right though, the d-pad is not the best. Kidpix....hmmmm.......gotta go find it, thanks for the info.

or if you want the more brainy type games... the first two Dr Brain games are kind of hard, but great fun.  Castle of Dr Brain and Island of Dr Brain.

[cabbage]

HercTNT: I just gotta pop in and recommend The Incredible Machine for your girls. I played the hell out of that as a kid at school! It's a lot of fun and encourages you to think outside the box.

[roflmao]

HercTNT: I just gotta pop in and recommend The Incredible Machine for your girls. I played the hell out of that as a kid at school! It's a lot of fun and encourages you to think outside the box.

YES!  That game is awesome! 

[BlueBMW]

Now granted... I started on Civilzation at about age 7 so.... how old are your daughters?

[HercTNT]

6 and 10. They are not into puzzle type games all that much. drawing games and platformers are what they mostly play although my youngest tries her hand at simcity. i know they made one of the catz or dogz type games for dos. they love that to, and i have not found em yet. still working on it. Professor, what are your thoughts on qemm 97 to free up memory dos programs. i really dont want to use a boot disk to get some of the games running. the idea is to make the games usable by kids. I tried teaching my oldest some dos commands earlier and that did not go so well.

[BlueBMW]

The fact that you tried to teach your kids anything DOS related makes me so happy.  I dont think kids these days appreciate pre GUI computing.  Now I sound like an old fart (at the ripe old age of 28!)

[HercTNT]

my girls like retro gaming and retro computing. They play dos games, classic gameboys and such all the time. But you have to admit, teaching them dos is alittle extreme. Their is no real reason for them or any other kid to learn it other than nostalgia. its not gonna stop me from trying though. My youngest gets sick often, i backlit a gameboy color so she can play tamagotchi at night when she cant sleep.

[roflmao]

But you have to admit, teaching them dos is alittle extreme. Their is no real reason for them or any other kid to learn it other than nostalgia. its not gonna stop me from trying though.

I'm glad you're still trying.  I still find reasons to use DOS these days, though folks not as nerdy as me probably would never need it.

Just in the past month I discovered ffmpeg, an awesome open source, command line video conversion utility that I built a series of batch files for, based on the type of video I was converting from and converting to.  I do a lot of video production and use Premiere CS5 for editing.  Unfortunately, Premiere is pretty picky as to the formats it's natively accepts.  Thanks to ffmpeg and my batch files, I haven't come across a video source file I haven't been able to convert to a format that Premiere happily works with.

So to make a short story long, there are still plenty of uses for DOS these days, in niche markets.

[ProfessorProfessorson]

Professor, what are your thoughts on qemm 97 to free up memory dos programs. i really dont want to use a boot disk to get some of the games running. the idea is to make the games usable by kids. I tried teaching my oldest some dos commands earlier and that did not go so well.

I've read good things about it before, but I have not needed to use it myself. Memmaker is all I have ever needed for Dos 6.22, and as for Dos mode outside of Win 95/98, well I just use my autoexec and config.sys files I keep handy. Honestly you have nothing to lose but time, so you might as well give it a shot.

[HercTNT]

will do, for whatever reason i cant seem to get my memory usage down. windows is not loading the device drivers in high memory despite using the load high command. after loading the cdrom driver and mscdex from your auto and config i was down below 540k. its not your configs, its windows. I put localloadHigh=1 in my 386enh section of my win.ini. i thought that was supposed to fix most of those problems for legacy applications?  i'm doing something wrong somewhere.

on a good note i finally got joe&mac for dos running. it looks alot more like the arcade version of the game then the snes one. very cool.

[ProfessorProfessorson]

will do, for whatever reason i cant seem to get my memory usage down. windows is not loading the device drivers in high memory despite using the load high command. after loading the cdrom driver and mscdex from your auto and config i was down below 540k. its not your configs, its windows. I put localloadHigh=1 in my 386enh section of my win.ini. i thought that was supposed to fix most of those problems for legacy applications?  i'm doing something wrong somewhere.

on a good note i finally got joe&mac for dos running. it looks alot more like the arcade version of the game then the snes one. very cool.

Try QEMM 97 then and see what happens. I've honestly never had it down that low before except on default files where I have not adjusted anything. Yours is being stubborn it sounds like. Worse comes to worse, reinstall Windows and try again. It could be something in the install got botched. Also, are you using the original Creative AWE32 install cd to install the card?