I remember my dad buying me a 386DX 40MHz Escom tower when I was around twelve. This was kind of a low end machine at that time, the 486DX4 with 100MHz being the top of line. But it was a big upgrade from our 286 with 8 MHz which to use I had to ask permission, while my father was fine with me being the main user of the new machine.

While the machine itself was the cheapest we could get at the Escom store because we were kind of broke (14000 ATS, around 1500 Euros in today's money), my dad granted me a Soundblaster 16 card, a double-speed CD-ROM drive and a couple of game collections on CD. One of those collections contained both DOTT and Sam & Max Hit The Road.

Making special boot floppies for managing conventional, expanded and extended memory so I could get those games to work was probably my introduction to technical trouble-shooting. And when eventually I got to get Sam & Max going and heard the Mad Scientist in the intro actually talking I completely lost my shit, because I expected no more than closed captions and some wavetable midi tunes in the background.

Loved that game so much for its artistic style and weird characters. Tunnel of Love, Big Foot, Giraffe Girl, the Country Singer douchebag ... what a colorful ensemble!

"heard the Mad Scientist in the intro actually talking I completely lost my shit" - HA! Exactly this!

Ah yea, fiddling around with autoexec.bat and config.sys to make funky menus to show the games I had installed (I think, it was a while ago ... also something to do with mscdex .. but that might have been later)

mscdex, I think was the ‘driver’ for the CD-ROM drive?

Sort of. MSCDEX were CD-ROM API extensions for MS-DOS. You had a low-level driver that talked to your optical drive, and MSCDEX talked to that.

Would that be considered a TSR?

Yep-- a classic example of one.

I remember convincing my mom I needed a Soundblaster to do homework.