Mail Archives: opendos/2003/12/10/07:36:42
On 2003-12-08, Jacob Brewer wrote:
> The Win98 EMM386 (I need that for SoundBlaster) still craps out, but
> the Dr. DOS EMM386 seems to run well with the win98 himem with the
> exception of a warning that says it should be used by itself (EMM386
> for DR.DOS only allows up to 64MB of memory).
You could try adding a /QUIET=HIMEM option to EMM386. However,
due to a minor (internally already fixed) bug in EMM386's command
line parsing, this option will not work on all configurations depending
on which internal modules get loaded by EMM386 (this depends
on the type of machine you have and the combination of configuration
switches you use).
If it does not work for you, you will get about a screenful of help info
or even corrupted screen output, and then you should remove the option
again. If it works, it will mute the warning you're seeing. In either case,
this warning is absolutely harmless.
While EMM386.EXE has an internal 32-bit optimized XMS driver, and
using this internal XMS driver results in a slightly smaller total memory
footprint and higher speed than using an external XMS driver like
HIMEM.SYS (which usually is only 16-bit code, since it will also have
to run on a 286), in this specific configuration of having more than
64 Mb of RAM, this is a minor down point in comparison to "loosing"
all the memory above 64 Mb.
Of course, the real solution is that the XMS driver in EMM386.EXE
gets extended to query newer System BIOS APIs so it would learn
there's more than 64 Mb of memory. A few other changes would be
necessary as well.
While I don't think, this receives a high priority right /now/ as few DOS
configurations /require/ more than 64 Mb of RAM, I think, it's already
on DeviceLogics' list of suggestions for possible future enhancement.
Greetings,
Matthias
--
<mailto:Matthias DOT Paul AT post DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>; <mailto:mpaul AT drdos DOT org>
http://www.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html; http://mpaul.drdos.org
"Programs are poems for computers."
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