Trixter
Veteran Member
Another nifty little trick I can do is to re-enable the EMS page frame in the E region and have both 80kb of upper memory and expanded memory available concurrently. Just imagine what kind of damage I could do by using a monochrome adapter. In theory that could expand conventional memory by 96kb, though I might have to use another driver to get at it. Perhaps if I removed my SCSI ROM and booted by floppy I could get an extra 16kb UMB block too, but that wouldn't be very practical for me. That would provide 896kb memory in total...and there are definetly XT systems out there that can do it.
I have just an Above Board and an XT, so I can't do nearly this kind of config, but I was able to finally get some stuff loaded high. Here's my experience:
PC DOS 2000 has a driver that, if you have and EMS board but do NOT load an EMS driver, will allow you to use the 64K page frame as UMB. This disables all of the rest of EMS though, so it's not really the best use of the RAM.
I just loaded QRAM and was astonished to find that it somehow uses the 64K page frame for UMBs while at the same time allowing full EMS to function. I have no idea how that is working but it is indeed working and I've been able to shave my system down to 580KB free from 571KB free. Desqview is working under it as well, so the EMS must be working.
The people at Quarterdeck were simply amazing. It's a shame that they wiped several source code hard drives when they were acquired by Symantec; I would have loved to see that code.
update: I ran Manifest and it looks like QRAM is using LIM EMS 4.0 to keep the page frame where it is at D000 and it mapped an additional block of RAM at E000!!!! That is so cool! That makes sense based on what Desqview recommends -- if you are going to totally commit to Desqview, they recommend that you set your PC's system ram to only 256KB, so that the EMS board can map the rest of it and you can run programs simultaneously in the mapped RAM. LIM EMS can't map into a place where memory already is. If you have a regular 640K machine, all Desqview can do is multitask only in system ram and then swap in/out of EMS.
QRAM is amazing, I can't believe I haven't run this until now. Now I need to try to find more EMS boards (I only have two
Update #2: I set DOS=umb and DOSDATA=umb and now I'm up to 591K free! I can load ncache2 and it loads in UMB too! This is crazy!
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