When I try to run Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb in dos it gives "Can't initialize mouse driver error type 0004 occurred". I am not sure what to do about this.

It will not run in windows 98 at all.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

You need drivers for your mouse when running it in full DOS mode. Look on your mouse to see it's brand manufacturer, then you can go to their website, or download some generic drivers.

When running in Windows 98, mice use 32-bit plug and play drivers which are incoporated into Windows, there's no need for installing or anything like that.

You could attempt to run it in DOS box, or "DOS shell" as it is called, a mini DOS mode that uses the DOS interface, but runs out of Windows.

Thanks
I was able to correct the mouse problem but now I am getting a different error message:

"Can't load scenery (2003)" or something like that

Now that I'm not sure about. But if the game is meant to run in MS-DOS mode, the safest way to play it is restart your computer in full DOS mode. You're probably more ceceptable to corruption if you run it out of the DOS box.

It's an old game, and games that old tend to optimize to use hardware directly, which win98 doesn't like. If you want to play old games, you need to make sure the conventional memory is big enough when you boot to DOS mode. After you load the mouse driver (mouse.com or mouse.sys), type "mem" and check. If you don't have 600k of free conventional memory, you need to do some memory optimization. The best is to check the game spec to see how many conventional memory and how many XMS or EMS memory are needed to run.