What did people do back in the day to manage changing CONFIG.SYS files around? - Before DOS 6 when the menu commands were introduced. I ask because PC-9800 series MS-DOS 6.20 doesn't seem to have the boot menu capability of western DOS.
I wrote a batch script but it feels like this is a task a lot of people would have had to do at some point and there might be a popular tool for it. #DOS #msdos #pcdos #pc98

@wyatt8740 As I recall, it was mostly having multiple floppies.

@foeclan That'd work. But only if booting from floppy.
I guess it didn't matter as much in the west, but drive lettering depends on what you boot from on the PC-98. Whatever you boot from, whether HDD or floppy or whatever, becomes drive A:.

@wyatt8740 honestly?

before dos 6 a lot of people didnt even have hard drives, so it wasnt an issue.

different config.sys? different floppy.

im not saying that no config.sys changer existed. config.sys wasnt locked, i dont think dos had file locking.

you changed config.sys by switching floppies. by the time people had hard drives, dos 6 existed.

also i played with the menu thing but i doubt a large percentage of people did. they were installing windows and didnt need to fuck around with that stuff.

then a few more years later win95 made the config.sys menu obsolete too. win95 could reboot into dos mode with various configurations.

@wyatt8740 you just had a CONFIG.SY1, .SY2, etc, and copied the one you wanted over. Sometimes also a matching AUTOEXEC.BA1.

@monsieuricon sounds hard to remember those names. Or like it wouldn't scale well... :p

@wyatt8740 I don't recall needing more than 2, tbh. One for my mom's work, one for playing games. :)

@monsieuricon I had to make three so far: one for windows 3.1 and SCSI CD-ROM drivers to load, one for most games, and one for a specific game that needed mouse.sys and himem.sys and emm386 and mouse.com loaded at boot. :p
Admittedly this is on a PC-9801 rather than an IBM compatible.

@wyatt8740 see, my experience predates CDROM drives. :) Back when I used DOS last, even 3.5 inch floppies were a rarity. I remember loading up Star Control 2 and being amazed that it actually played music through the PC speaker (my mom's Amstrad 286-compatible didn't have a real sound card).

@monsieuricon I learned to program first on an unexpanded VIC-20 with only a datasette drive... so I'm not entirely unfamiliar with that stuff. Also got an AT&T 6300 (Olivetti M24) 8086 PC here with 360KB floppy drives :)