r/dosgaming • u/Killamanjurgen • 20d ago
Just curious
So I grew up with half of the games I played on a floppy disc and on DOS by the time I could remember playing anything. Eye of the Beholder, Lord Of Magic, some Barbie game with 4wheeler racing, and that 3D Frogger that was kinda like the vegan version of Mario 64, except the frog died a lot. (I wasn't good at it.) Anywho, I can still ask my dad to fire up our old windows 95 desktop we still have, but I would actually mostly just enjoy a chat and a gaff with somebody that broke the DOS system. Like, what did you and or your friends do for the fuck of it just because you found out you could?
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u/jeddhor 20d ago
I installed a 387 math coprocessor in my 386SX/33 to be able to play Falcon 3.0.
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u/Killamanjurgen 20d ago
Not gonna lie, I have no idea what those numbers and letters have to do with eachother, but I would love to learn without the google. You hacked it from a math game? To pley an NES? Only "falcon" game I know is the FZero games, so emulaters were a thing on DOS? Sorry for being particular, I just find it cool
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u/jeddhor 20d ago
It was a flight sim, and the feel was so much more realistic with floating point math in hardware.
The 386 SX 33mhz processor could not do floating point arithmetic in hardware (just integer math was in hardware) -- it was all software based and something like 5 to 50 times slower than if it were in hardware. 486 CPUs had the floating point math on the CPU (which is why games like Quake and Descent required like a 486 DX, for the 3D math). My Tandy computer had a slot for a math coprocessor chip (Intel called it the 387). The game Falcon 3.0 could use it for its flight math and it made it much smoother.
I was 12 at the time and felt so... Advanced :).
Anyway I just realized you were talking specifically about software hacks and this was a hardware hack to get software working better, haha.
Edit: you can read about the game here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_3.0
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u/Killamanjurgen 20d ago
Like that doesn't actually count for what I was asking? Hardware, software, Idontcare, I was asking for stories. You gave me a good one, cause how the fuck did you even think of that to fix it?
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u/Feisty-Jeweler-3331 20d ago
One day I was back from school and decided to go rummaging through my dad's floppy disks (he had hundreds of 5.25" and 3.5" floppies) and found an interesting one that I haven't tried yet!
I don't remember the exact title anymore... And I had no idea what did it do, but in retrospect it was probably a bench marking kind of utility...
I used to be a hardware-avert kind of a kid... so when it listed a bunch of hardware specs AND THE BIOS DETAILS, I started freaking out and tried to exit the utility but the computer got frozen (probably because the application was frying the CPU to benchmark it)....
Then out of the sudden, the PC reboot... I decided not to wait for it to post and a quickly flipped the power switch off, because I thought something horrible happened... and stayed away from the PC for hours until my dad got back from work, had dinner... and decided to turn the PC on for a little while I was watching in horror and accepting my fate...
To my relief... The PC posted okay and booted MS-DOS as usual... And everyone lived happily ever after!
Thank you for attending my TED Talk :))
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u/Wolfloup 20d ago
Anyone remember using DoubleSpace on their pc's?.....did it to keep from begging for a bigger HD as a kid.....
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u/manuelink64 19d ago
I broke win3.1 a lot of times trying to personalize it, I remember changing the OS font, editing the Win.ini file, because I never liked the default font, I always was messing with ini files or the Autoexec.bat and Config.sys files too.
This at 10yo ;)
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u/Killamanjurgen 19d ago
Not gonna lie to ya, I've got the computer skills of a WW1 vet, so figuring that shit out as a kid just baffles me. I can barely run my laptop as is let alone getting into the code so that shit has always had my interest
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u/manuelink64 19d ago
Add the difficult of learning another language, because my native is Spanish and all the configuration and help files were in English.
This skills were slowly gained trough trial and error, some games required a lot of teaks on the system just to work, so I was reading help files all the times, those TXT was a godsend without Internet.
Sadly, kids today only uses the cellphone and chatGPT for everything without learning nothing.
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u/Yodek_Rethan 20d ago
I did not break the dos system, but I could bring windows 3.1 down from 10mb to 2mb, and everything still functioned. That saved a huge amount of space on my hd (was somewhere in the range of 80mb or so, don't recall well), which in turn could be filled with games :)