This.
I remember having to play games without any sound because I couldn't figure out how to fit the SCSI Hard Disk driver and CD Rom driver and soundblaster driver into the 640k especially since lots of games flat out refused to work if you loaded himem.sys or QEMM which allowed you to load the drivers into the extended/expanded memory areas.
You just brought up the horrible memories of computer gaming pre-directX/3d. What a mess it was.
Wonder if I have a floppy lying around with all my old custom autoexec.bat files? :)