Nice video. It's good to see a reminder about how the PC version of a game could change radically on different systems and configurations. While my computer ran VGA/MCGA just fine, I spent many hours seeing how well different games handled EGA. I'd like to extend a dishonorable mention to
Space Quest V.
- Most colors turned gray.
- Many scenes contained color cycling and other palette effects which the EGA driver simply ignored.
- In my version, the crest scrubbing arcade sequence had an option to skip in EGA, but using it didn't work and left the game incompletable.
Minor correction: at 0:14 in your voiceover, you refer to EMS as "Extended Memory".
XMS is Extended Memory,
EMS is Expanded Memory. I do not know any useful way to remember this distinction.
To really limit a game, you can reduce the amount of available memory still further by using the
LOADFIX command. (That's the one we use in small doses to make
WC2 behave properly.)
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If no EMS memory is available, by the time I use LOADFIX to consume an additional 80kB, the explosions turn into flak bursts, and music is gone during flight sequences.
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This happens up to 86kB. If I try this with
LOADFIX -87 WC.EXE, the game won't even launch. These numbers may vary slightly with your DOSBox configuration, since what actually matters is the amount of low memory available, not how much you consume.
At some point the cockpit damage effects (sparks and dangling wires) also vanish. Overall, WC1 had impressively graceful degradation under low memory conditions. Graphics and music vanish one at a time, as the game still loads everything it can squeeze into the remaining space. However, I do remember a futile series of attempts to tweak the CONFIG.SYS on a boot disk for a friend's 286 in the hope of getting WC1 to even launch. Meanwhile, my fancy 486DX-33 had to be slowed to 16MHz to make the game playable.