DOS troubleshooting for old games

[tim31]

I recently grabbed an old dell with Win98 that was going to be thrown out at work. I thought I might be able to play some older games I haven't run in years, specifically the old EA games like the USNF games and derivatives. Problem is, I don't know enough about DOS to get things like CD drives, pointing devices, joysticks, and audio to initialize. I've googled around a bit, but haven't had any straightforward luck. Can anyone help out with this?

[Stark]

Or you could just use DOSbox etc. Setting shit up in DOS (especially for things with custom memory managers) was an art unto itself, and pretty much unnecessary these days.

Then again, simple stuff like CD drives, mouse drivers etc are easy: all config.sys and autoexec.bat stuff.

[Netko]

If you want to go native, better use a boot disk from somewhere (quick google turned up this: seems to have all thats needed) then trying to hand optimize: it is an art onto itself, and while finding out you out-optimized the built-in optimizer in DOS 6.22 is was great back in the day, you really need to find a better way to amuse yourself these days. Still, here is an guide that touches upon the major ways of tweaking the dos setup (again, 5-second google, there are probably better ones available).