I remember Tornado needing 612kb. That took me some serious optimizing.
The other part of me is fully aware that I have forgotten just about everything, even the filename of config.sys was only resurfaced by other posts here.
That said, the other reason you could still jump right in, is that these systems were accessible. Small enough to be understandable by a child's brain, a couple of text files you edited by hand, tinkering among a small number of parameters each of which you could test within a few minutes at most, so that worst case you spent a day dinking around with your setup. And without the distractions of the internet or thousands of free ad-supported dopamine pumps to displace your main purpose of getting this game to work.
Contrast this with today: you buy a game on Steam for $30, it doesn't work. What do you do? You have to search the internet or go to the forums, and try any number of random things that are in no way contained or enumerable and the knowledge isn't transferable. Our systems are 100x bigger than any single person can conceivably know.
It was originally borne of a need to allow us all to have our own preferred setup on shared PCs in the computer lab we worked in, and just grew from there. My pal Dave may have given us the idea with his scheme of multiple boot profiles on his Amiga, come to think of it.
>moving stuff between EMS/XMS so older games could fit.
Oh god this. My pal Mike and I -- who, I note fondly, I was visiting with last weekend, 30+ years later -- spent a LONG time basically becoming subject matter experts on DOS memory allocation and manipulation. It was my first experience with hard-won knowledge that was nevertheless useless relatively quickly; I remember NONE of it now. But holy cow we futzed around with this SO MUCH -- initially to accommodate various games or other heavyweight programs, and then out of momentum.
A great retro YouTuber, Phils Computer Lab, has a similar menu available for download. It's a pretty slick menu kind of like the one you've described.
When I hear people today ask, “how do I get into security?” My immediate answer is that you’re going to need a very underpowered 486 and a copy of Wing Commander 3 if you really want to do it right.
As a kid I used the MultiConfig (based on a guide in PC Magazine!) to have different menus. When all you were trying to run was games, maxing your conventional memory was key. I had different combos for sound, no sound, CD-ROM, boot to windows, moving stuff between EMS/XMS so older games could fit.
I would meticulously try different combos and seeing that `mem` command return something above 600KB was a reward in and of itself.