Help with 386 running Stacker

  • Thread starter Thread starter Unreg Phy
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Unreg Phy

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Hi, I've got a 386 that I've been rehabilitating for the sole purpose of running old DOS games - Privateer, specifically. My current hurdle (after loosening the stuck hard drive with repeated performance tests, and installing sound drivers again) is that the cursed box is running Stacker. I'm hoping there's people here who've dealt with this creepy utility before, and still remember how to get around it...

I don't know if this is what Stacker DOES, but it's got the meat of my data hidden in its compressed file on what appears to be a fake drive partition. Basically, if I edit out the calls for it in config.sys, it loads the uncompressed stuff (what is normally my 386's D: drive) as the C: drive, and then poops out on the calls for mouse and speaker drivers and whatnot, because all those drivers are compressed. If the calls to stacker are replaced, it loads that, and the uncompressed stuff gets "swapped" to the D: drive, with the compressed stuff becoming the C: Drive.

So I guess my first question is, will Privateer run under Stacker? If not, can I move the essential drivers to the uncompressed section, place Privateer in there, and edit out the calls to stacker? And if not that, how do I go about making a boot disk that will load my CD, mouse, and SB16 drivers?

I'd really appreciate any help you can give me with this; I'm itchin' to punch tachyon-flavored holes in a few Retro ships! :D
 
My personal advice would be to copy the whole contents of the stacked drive to whatever backup media you prefer.
Remove the stacker driver.
Delete the stacked drive (the file).
Then copy the backed up contents onto the regular media.
Work from there. Stacked drives/super store/drivespace/... always are a pain. They never worked relieably for me.
 
wow, it´s been AGES since I´ve heard the word Stacker. At age 12 I would have solved your problem in a minute, but I really can´t remember how to handle Stacked drives anymore. :p

Listen to cff or get a bigger HD. You can trade a CIC pen for a 300MB HD nowadays.
 
Just like to update... I went ahead and bent Autoexec.bat and config.sys so they only booted the uncompressed section, and migrated the important drivers to there as well. Privateer works like a charm now, although it does drop frames in heavy fighting. Ah well, it was a more 486-focused game anyway. :) I'm currently about a fifth of the way into the plot missions, if that tells y'all anything techwise.

My next step is to figure out how to uncompress the Stacker file, that would clear up a lot of room considering the uncompressed section has less than a meg of space left on it. :D

Thanks for the help!
 
Unreg Phy said:
My next step is to figure out how to uncompress the Stacker file, that would clear up a lot of room considering the uncompressed section has less than a meg of space left on it. :D
Thanks for the help!
Click to expand...

I don't think this is possible. The normal route here is to 'mount the file', that is to load the drivers, and copy everythig off it. Then just delete the stacker file. I don't think there are any Winzip like utilities to just look into stacker files.
 
If you can find your original Stacker disks, there might be a utility on that to remove it... of course, if you were using Stacker, it's possible that you can't fit all the data uncompressed in the first place...
 
Worf: There might be an utility. But I'd NOT use it. I did it once with SuperStore (a Stacker clone in DRDos). Lets just say I needed to use a HEX editor to manually rewrite the partition table after trying to remove Superstore with the utility that came with it. Fdisk would just say "foreign os" and don't let me remove it...
 
Can you believe all the stuff we used to know and forgot? QEMM, Stacker, getting the right combination of drivers into high memory to free up as much of that precious 640K of conventional memory as possible, etc. Windows may be bloated, but some things are definitely easier now.
 
cff said:
I don't think this is possible. The normal route here is to 'mount the file', that is to load the drivers, and copy everythig off it. Then just delete the stacker file. I don't think there are any Winzip like utilities to just look into stacker files.
Click to expand...

Really... ouch. The problem is, I'd have to back everything up onto floppy - there's a lot stored in there that the original disks to have been lost or corrupted - PCTools and Win 3.1, notably. However, I seem to remember darn near every other program I had running reasonably well under Stacker; so if that's the case then after I'm done blasting apart Stelteks and Retros I'll re-bend the boot files to load Stacker again.

Again, thanks for all the advice!
 
Valkyrie386 said:
Can you believe all the stuff we used to know and forgot? QEMM, Stacker, getting the right combination of drivers into high memory to free up as much of that precious 640K of conventional memory as possible, etc. Windows may be bloated, but some things are definitely easier now.
Click to expand...

I miss those times... If you were a good autoexec/config tweaker you could make any game run in your computer. I remember how hard I had to work to make WC3 run (barely) in my old 486...

Nowadays we´re stuck with "this program caused an error and will be shut down" and there´s not much that can be done about that :p
 
you should be able to run from a compressed drive, but i wouldn't recommend it on a 386, i'd say the perfect privateer systems would be 50 mhz 486dx's or better, with 8 mb of ram and a tseng labs 4000 video card, and a gravis ultrasound using mega-em.

you'd probably get a better gaming experience from playing through dosbox on your current computer...

as for moving the data, use the program"fxlink" and a null-modem cable to move files from the stacker volume to another computer, and back after you have removed the stacker volume.
 
Good lord, I get terrifyed to remember all this crap. ARGH. I had drivespace once. and qemm. I'm really thankfull these things are gone. even tweaking 3d drivers nowadays is less annoying.

and good job making priv run on a 386, it was really meant for 486s...
 
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