Matrix Games Forums

First dumb question:
What prevents a PBEM scenario from being edited by either one of the players, to give increased power or experience to the combat units of one side?

Second dumb question:
My computer died and the hard disk was reformatted. I also had 256meg of RAM added while the computer was in the shop. Now I can't play pacwar. I vaguely remember having to do something in DOS to increase the memory. CHKDSK says I have only 565K available.

Dumb q1 - becuae the password system SEEMS to works on the editor(s) too ie a pbem file won't open in the editor

Dumb q2 - still dumb

For playing Pacific War, the key thing is what operating system (i.e. what version of Windows) you're using. If it's Windows Me, you're pretty much out of luck. If it's Windows 95 or 98, you need to check your AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files to load as much as possible into high memory. (Oddly enough, you can get very good results by deleting everything from those two files--the default settings work fairly well.)

If it's Windows 2000 or XP, check the "Sticky" poll at the top of this forum. The main thing is that you need custom versions of AUTOEXEC and CONFIG, but with your own filename extensions. One of my later posts to that poll has a downloadable set of those files which seem to have helped a number of people.

I had no problems playing PacWar with Windows Me. I could even change missions for carrier air groups with no out-of-memory errors. It was a simple case of hitting Ctrl during bootup and then specifying which drivers to enable/disable. Can't remember which ones, but the info is somewhere on these forums.

Thanks Captain,
I have windows 98. I completely deleted autoexec.bat and config. sys, a few lines at a time. That succeeded in booting the game when got up to 590K of free memory, but I kept getting "cannot find file" messages when executing. After lots of other trials, I reloaded the game yet again, and it appears to be working finally! Not sure what I did to fix it.

......a couple of weeks without Pacwar leaves one section of the brain empty........like an alcoholic who is unable to find a drink.

Thanks again for the advice

If the game does not work at all in the DOS Box have you thinked of using a Win98/ME Bootdisk with a fully configured config.sys and Autoexec.bat ?
-> A little DOS-experience is needed to configure the memory managers but it should work without problems

(do not download it)

as usual ...