Getting Keen 4-6 and Dreams mods running on real DOS PCs

[dark]

I use qemm, third party memory manager, in conjunction with having no tsrs loaded. That gives me 633k free out of the 640k limit. Keen startup screen reflects 382k standard memory available. I have had good luck with keen mods with this much conventional memory free, occasionally music may not load for some large complicated levels in mods but it has helped substantially compared to other configurations (I just tried the noumb trick in this thread for the first time, so probably adding the xms in to the picture will get rid of those issues).



Might check your patch next to see if my xms value is higher.


EDIT ooh Foray in the Forest is working well now! I think that was one of the more troubling mods to run on real hw. This is exciting.

[Benvolio]

Looks like great fun. Any limitations on newer mods processor wise? I played Galaxy itself on the humble 8086 many years ago... would Foray and other state of the art projects work on such an old CPU assuming memory stuff was sorted?

[dark]

I think the answer is yes. Keen 4-6 seem to run well on all 386s and most 286s, and imo there are very few people even running 386s or weaker cpus as retro gaming machines these days... The PC in my picture is a 386 with a 25mhz CPU. The original keen games and extensive mods like suburb shenanigans or foray in the forest run at full speed and are very smooth on it.

I've played several mods on a pentium 1 system I have from around 1996/1997 and they all run great on that machine as well assuming there is sufficient memory for them. Getting as much memory free on real DOS hardware as you might get in the dosbox default settings has been the slight bottleneck that limits playing certain levels of mods on real hardware with music turned on, but with the various tips in this thread to free up additional memory for keen, I think basically all mods, even complex ones, should work well at this point.

[keenmaster486]

Vanilla Keen 1-3 runs fine albeit a big choppy even on an original IBM PC with EGA, but it should have a turbo XT.

Vanilla Keen Galaxy runs on an 8088 but really needs a 286 to be enjoyable.

With mods, YMMV. FITF in particular tries to run at 70fps by default, which I've found bogs down even a 386 if you walk in the wrong part of the map. Setting it to 35fps (the original Keen framerate) gives you much more leeway.

[K1n9_Duk3]

Looks like great fun. Any limitations on newer mods processor wise? I played Galaxy itself on the humble 8086 many years ago... would Foray and other state of the art projects work on such an old CPU assuming memory stuff was sorted?

As I mentioned earlier, Foray in the Forest will run on 286 systems. It will not run on 8088 or 8086 systems, since the code was compiled for the 80286 instruction set. I'm not sure if it would run on 80186 or 80188 systems, but the answer is probably "no".