Comanche: Maximum Overkill from 1992 does weird things on Intel processors

Let's do another article about weird code in video games.

The original 1992 Comanche release is extremely picky about memory managers. The game refuses to work with EMM emulators and crashes when EMM386 is active. The game may also hang or reboot the system when HIMEM.SYS is not loaded (the problem seems to be system configuration dependent).

These issues are clearly noted in the Comanche documentations, but at the same time they're also all signs of a substandard DOS extender.

On top of that, the game authors accomplished a remarkable feat: By only loosely following Intel's instructions on how to enter protected mode, NovaLogic managed to write a game which worked on the then-existing 386 and 486 processors, but under some circumstances failed to run on Pentium and later processors.

Michal Necasek at OS/2 Museum

As usual, a great read from Michal Nacesek.