I have an old (and much-loved) game called ‘Zeppelin - Giants of the Sky’ produced in 1994 by Microprose (Ikarion Software). The game comes on three floppy disks. It ran well on my old Compaq LTE 386 laptop with Windows 3.1 but it will not load (or run!) on my Pentium II 233 MHz laptop. I’ve been told that this is a common problem with old games. Is there anyway to get around the problem?

Not being able to play older games could be due to any number of factors. I had a look on the internet for the game which you are having the problem running and discovered that the game runs under DOS. This will make our life easier in getting the program to run as we don’t need to worry about running it under Windows. You are more than likely attempting to run this game through Windows. When doing this, you may receive an error message such as ‘Insufficient Conventional Memory’ and the game will not run. If you get past this message, there may also be several other problems when running the game. It is always best to run DOS games from native DOS rather than a DOS window in Windows. The first way you can try to do this is by exiting Windows to DOS. You can do this by going to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Shutdown’ and select the option to ‘Restart the computer in MS-DOS mode’. Once the computer has loaded into DOS, try running your game from the DOS command prompt. If you are still having difficulties, try booting into DOS by using a boot disk. Assuming you are running Windows 95 or 98 on your computer, you can create a boot disk by going to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Settings’ > ‘Control Panel’ and open the ‘Add/Remove Programs’ control panel. In the window that appears, click the ‘Startup Disk’ tab. From here you can create a boot disk. Place this disk into your computer before booting up. This will cause your computer to boot off the disk into DOS from where you can try running your game. However, you will not be able to access your CD-ROM, as no CD-ROM drivers were copied. Hopefully, as your game is so old, it comes on disk which has been installed fully onto the hard drive. But if it does require a CD to run, then you will need to copy your CD-ROM’s drivers onto your boot disk. You can find comprehensive instructions on how to do this at www.everythingcomputers.com/windows_boot_disk.htm . However, if after trying both these suggestions you are still having problems, have a look at the following website:
www.ina-support.com/dos_troubleshooting/index.asp. This is the troubleshooting page for Infogrames. Although these are not the people who created your game, they do have excellent tips for helping to run DOS games on more modern machines running Windows.