From: "Matthias Paul" <PAUL-MA AT reze-1 DOT rz DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>
Organization:  Rechenzentrum RWTH Aachen
To: opendos AT delorie DOT com
Date:          Mon, 27 Nov 2000 17:41:24 +0100
Subject:       RE: BASIC & EMS (was: Optimizing CONFIG.SYS...)
X-mailer: Pegasus Mail v3.22
Message-ID: <89234527C33@reze-1.rz.rwth-aachen.de>
Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com

On Mon, 27 Nov 2000 Joe Da Silva wrote:

> The only real problem with EMS, is the 64K hole it makes in
> the UMB region (sometimes 32K, as noted by M.P.). 
> Perhaps (I don't know how much work is involved), Matthias could 
> add "cloaking" to EMM386 - that would help GREATLY (bug fixes
> are more urgent, of course)!

In fact, there exist issues of EMM386 (available in the SDK) which 
come with an embedded DPMS server. 

But CLOAKING was developed by Helix (for their Netroom memory 
manager). Helix is now part of Network Associates (or was it 
Computer Associates???), and Netroom no longer exists as far as 
I can tell. CLOAKING and DPMS are very similar in concept and since 
CLOAKING also support the DPMS API (introducing a few peculiarities 
with their implementation), I would call CLOAKING a superset of DPMS. 
However, I have no info, if they licenced DPMS from Novell, or did it 
themselfs.

Helix had a number of drivers which utilized CLOAKING, including
a disk cache and a MSCDEX derivative, but the only 3rd party program 
I am aware of that uses CLOAKING is the Logitech LMOUSE driver
since ca. 6.50+. Current DOS issues of that mouse driver still support 
the CLOAKING API, but do not provide the CLOAKING.EXE driver any
more, but you can use that of an older issue.
Is anyone here aware of other drivers using CLOAKING?

Well, I think it would make more sense to change LMOUSE to use
DPMS instead of CLOAKING, since alot more 3rd party programs are 
using DPMS. It might also be a good idea to add DPMS support
to CTMOUSE to have 

1. a freely available example source how to "DPMS" an existing driver
   (so others can use that to adapt the techniques to their own
   drivers)
   
2. to still have a tiny mouse driver when Logitech decides to
   abandon support of their DOS driver (they might have done 
   already by now, at least this was appeared to me due to
   their neclectance to fix a few minor issues, I reported 
   a while back...)   

> Also, I wonder if, on machines which can use F000-F7FF for
> EMS, this address space can simply be added to the UMB
> "pool" instead?

Try EMM386 /USE=F000-F7FF /RAM=F000-F7FF

But if you also have an EMS frame somewhere, I suggest to move
that to E800h instead of using the F000h-F7FFh range as
permanent upper RAM. I have made better experiences this way.

 Matthias
 
 
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Matthias Paul, Ubierstrasse 28, D-50321 Bruehl, Germany
eMail: <Matthias DOT Paul AT post DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>
Web  : http://www.rhrz.uni-bonn.de/~uzs180/mpdokeng.html
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