Needing help installing mouse and CDROM drivers in Win95 dos mode

[DSN]

I'm wanting to test my DOS games under Win95 dos mode.
But I don't remember on how to load drivers for mouse and cdrom in dos mode.
Can someone remember? I must also free up more memory for my games because loading drivers takes more conventional memory.
Anyone can give me help? I have only 590K memory in dos mode without drivers loaded.

Thanks

EDIT: If I select "Command Prompt only" when I press F8 I only get 594K memory.

[leilei]

The "proper way" back then would be dealing with whatever real-mode drivers your OEM conveniently supplied at install time, or whatever drivers your mouse/cdrom kit supplied on floppies. but nowadays you could lazily take OAKCDROM.SYS from the 95/98 boot disks, throw them in autoexec.bat/config.sys, and use CuteMouse for the mouse driver easily.

[DSN]

Thanks. But I must optimize my base memory also.

[DSN]

I now created a Drivers folder on my C: Drive and put in the ctmouse.exe and oakcdrom.sys drivers.
But I don't remember on how to edit my autoexec.bat and config.sys to load.
Can someone remember me?
Thanks

[alexmocanu]

Something like this should work...I think:

config.sys

Code: Select all

DEVICEHIGH=C:\DRIVERS\oakcdrom.sys /D:CD

autoexec.bat

Code: Select all

LOADHIGH C:\DOS\MSCDEX.EXE /D:CD /l:D 
LOADHIGH C:\DRIVERS\ctmouse.exe

[DSN]

Thanks. I got it working, but I must free up memory now, this reduced my memory to 524K.
How I can optimize my conventional memory?
Some games need more memory to run.

AUTOEXEC.BAT:

SET CTCM=C:\WINDOWS
SET SOUND=C:\PROGRA~1\CREATIVE\CTSND
SET MIDI=SYNTH:1 MAP:E
SET BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 H5 P330 T6
LOADHIGH C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\MSCDEX.EXE /D:CD /L:E
LOADHIGH C:\DRIVERS\ctmouse.exe

CONFIG.SYS:

DEVICEHIGH=C:\DRIVERS\oakcdrom.sys /D:CD

Are you sure that I need to change something more?

EDIT: Selecting "Command Prompt only" when pressing F8 I get only 528K memory with drivers loaded.

[alexmocanu]

Back in the old days I would use something called Memmaker - a tool that automatically tried to optimize DOS's config files to release more base memory. It was built in with DOS 6.22 and available separately for DOS 7/win9x).
It was available on MS's old FTP site. The original ftp site is gone but there is this mirror here: http://ftpmirror.your.org/pub/misc/ftp.microsoft.com/Softlib/MSLFILES/
Download olddos.exe from there and within that archive you should find Memmaker among other things.

[DSN]

I now put in OLDDOS.EXE in the windows system folder. What do I need to do now?
Is the correct place for this file?

[alexmocanu]

That's a self extracting archive. You need to extract it's content.
1. Create a directory on the C drive and copy that file there (e.g. C:\OLDDOS for example).
2. In dos mode go to that directory and execute that file. That will extract it's contents within that directory. (e.g. CD C:\OLDDOS then execute OLDDOS.EXE)
3. From that directory execute memmaker.exe

[DSN]

I got this message in Memmaker:

error.png (20.16 KiB) Viewed 9704 times

I am running Memmaker in the OLDDOS directory on my C: Drive.
In which directory Memmaker must be?

[alexmocanu]

Ran a quick test on a Win95 VM and this is what needs to be done:
EMM386.EXE and HIMEM.SYS are already present in the Windows directory so you just need to copy the following files to C:\WINDOWS: Memmaker.exe, Memmaker.hlp, Memmaker.inf, Sizer.exe, and Chkstate.sys
After that run MEMMAKER from the C:\WINDOWS directory and every time it restarts (about 2-3 times) make sure to press F8 and boot into "Command Prompt Only" until it's done.

After it finishes there might be an error in CONFIG.SYS (the LASTDRIVE directive). Either delete that line or just ignore the error.

[DSN]

Thanks. But I got only 544K conventional memory free after running Memmaker.
Is there a way to free up more memory?
I removed LASTDRIVE from my config.sys.
Some of my games will probably require more than this.