Matrix Games Forums

Hi all. Im having major problems loading any self executing MATRIX games or updates. Specificaly: I'm running a Gateway Pent II 450 with windows 98. I have the antivirus disabled and all background applications closed or disabled. Each time I try to load a program I get the first Window...INITIALIZING SETUP, then a quick flash of the blue background and nothing. No error signals or indications of problems, just a quick flash and nothing, just booted back to WIN98. I have had this problem with the updates to SPWaW, WiR and now PW:Matrix Project. I have downloaded several times thinking I had corrupted downloads and even got the SPWaW CD and received the same symptoms. Hope some one out there has an idea on what to do. As you can imagine knowing these games are at my finger tips and not being able to play them falls under the major frustration heading!!

JS: I will try something that may help you. It worked for me on another download. Go to TOOLS, click on INTERNET OPTIONS, Click on securities Tab and check your level of security. My browser rejected words like Assault (the west wall)Blitzkreig and yes even Hellmonth so just consider what it might be doing to SPWAW.....

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Sm:):)th Sailing...chief

i'm having the same problem as hudson .. but only with PACWAR .. WIR worked fine .. so did SPWAW.. i tried the security option but it failed to work .. thanks for the post though .. its a better response than we had in the pacwar forums.. if you have any other ideas i'd be grateful.

RobB: I hoped my last post would help but.....Do you have DSL lines? I read on another post that they have cross talk problems, this also could contaminate downloads. Another thing comes to mind and it may be far fetched, but do you have extension phone which someone could inadvertantly pick up?

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Sm:):)th Sailing...chief

I'm having the same problem as Rob Brennan...WIR downloaded and runs okay...PacWar downloaded okay as far as I know but kicks me back to the desktop after clicking on the Play PacWar with an error message. Does anyone know if the Matrix download is adaptable to be run on a old Win 3.1 / MS-DOS platform? While I have a SSI CD version of PacWar I would like to try the Matrix version instead. Any ideas? If we don't get an answer soon, I suspect that I may just have to give up on getting PacWar to run at this point. Frustrating.

Went back to the basics. Found out that my DOS setup on both machines didn't give me the 570K mem required by PACWAR. Transferred the Matrix files to my old Win3.1 /MS-DOS machine and used the old boot disk approach. The PACWAR load runs just fine. Haven't tinkered with my Win98 machine DOS files to get it to run on that machine.

thanks you both of you. i really appreciate any and all responses even if they don;t work .. any idea is better than none at all. re pacwar and memory .. is there a commercial memory freer upper ( bad lingo ) as my machine rarely gets above 76% free in the system resources ( directly related to mem avail). basically i bought a duffer . new enough so that deus ex chugs along but not too old that pacwar works .. tougth dilemma .. anyway thanks again all

RobB,
easiest way to free up system resources is to disable programmes that load at startup which you don't need or use much.
Things such as scanner drivers, Real player and even the active desktop option chew up resources.
JsH,
are the files you download exactly the same size as listed on the download page ? Do you use a d/l manager like getright or net vampire ?
Also do you reboot after downloading before trying to install the programmes ?

Originally posted by RobBrennan:
thanks you both of you. i really appreciate any and all responses even if they don;t work .. any idea is better than none at all. re pacwar and memory .. is there a commercial memory freer upper ( bad lingo ) as my machine rarely gets above 76% free in the system resources

Folks, WiR and PAC are *DOS* programs, the "available resources" under Windows is *irrelevant*. What you need to do is maximize available memory in a Windows DOS "box", not Windows itself. For this, you have to clean up and optimize your config.sys and autoexec.bat, plus maybe some work on the DOS box .PIF file, although I've not found this necessary. Perhaps you'd prefer to keep a "DOS boot disk" with the optimized setup, although that is not required (with DOS 6.22 and above you can also setup the internal boot menu it supports which allows multiple configurations).

Your objectives are to remove all programs that are being loaded into memory that are not essential, and to get as much of DOS and the essential drivers into high memory. The programs in question will usually be drivers for various things. If you go the "DOS boot disk" route you shouldn't have to load *any* other programs unless you need a driver to use some weird equipment like a nonstandard video card or something.

I can't explain the specifics of the optimization process for config.sys and autoexec.bat in a short message, as we all know DOS configuration is an arcane subject, but I'll give an equivalent example of an optimized config.sys, and autoexec.bat (I use the internal boot menu feature so my config.sys and autoexec.bat support multiple setups and don't look exactly like this).

CONFIG.SYS
----------
break=off
files=50
lastdrive=Z
switches=/F
buffershigh=30,0
dos=high,umb,auto
device=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS /testmem :off
device=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE noems ram highscan verbose

rem Essential drivers loaded here

rem This is an example of loading a driver high
devicehigh=C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\MTMCDAI.SYS /D:MTMIDE01

rem Optional, this is what is assumed
shell=C:\COMMAND.COM /P

AUTOEXEC.BAT
------------
SET BLASTER=A220 I7 D1 H5 P330 T6
SET PATH=C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND
WIN.COM

On my system this results in a DOS box under Windows 98SE with 622,240 (608k) free memory in the lower 640k memory area where DOS programs run. With this, I have never had a DOS program fail for lack of memory, except for Ultima 7 many many moons ago, and also programs which require EMS memory. You'll notice EMS is disabled in the above configuration; those programs needing EMS have their own configuration.

If you have DOS 6.22 or above, check the online help available for the parameters for HIMEM and EMM386. Note that the "highscan" parameter of EMM386 is potentially dangerous and might crash a machine, but it recovers more upper memory on my system and it has never caused problems for me. Be careful, some of you may have upper memory that is badly fragmented because of the specific hardware that you have, but this shouldn't be the case for recent machines (last, say, 3 years at least?).


[This message has been edited by Ed Cogburn (edited November 13, 2000).]