strange. I strongly remember running these from dos, but you're right! The human memory is a weird thing.
Then my vote would be for quake. Either that or the 11th hour. I don't remember if that game had high system requirements or was just plain weird, but I could never get that thing running properly on my 4x cd-rom.
try screamer rally. You need a p2 at least and a high end vga card to run 640x480 software mode. There was a voodoo2 patch for the best experience.
The 11th Hour and Wing Commander Privateer were two games that were always a pain in the ass to get to work smoothly for me. Also El-Fish was a massive glutton that would take hours to render fish unless you had a solid system.
What's with all these games needing 4+ megabytes of RAM? I thought 640k was more than enough for everybody.