What is this EMS setting in a 286 BIOS?

[nestor]

I have a 286 motherboard with the Acer M1207 chipset that shows this screen on the BIOS:

Does it mean that it supports EMS memory using the standard RAM?. I think a special driver would be required...

This is the chipset:

Any idea?

 

[krebizfan]

A number of chipsets for late era 286 systems had the ability to make extended memory work as expanded memory (EMS). Chips & Technologies NEAT is what I recall. You still will need an EMS driver to actually use any memory assigned to EMS; no driver and the memory can't be accessed. That BIOS screen looks fairly normal (if inflexible) for a motherboard that could get lots of RAM installed.

 

[Chuck(G)]

...and most of those EMS features were 3.2. EMS 4.0 is a bit more complex.

 

[nestor]

Thank you!. I think LIM 3.2 will be sufficient. Does anyone have the driver?

I will try this m1207.arj

EDIT: It works!

 

[Trixter]

A number of chipsets for late era 286 systems had the ability to make extended memory work as expanded memory (EMS). Chips & Technologies NEAT is what I recall. You still will need an EMS driver to actually use any memory assigned to EMS; no driver and the memory can't be accessed. That BIOS screen looks fairly normal (if inflexible) for a motherboard that could get lots of RAM installed.

Some were usable without a driver. The Dell 316sx and I believe 325sx could dedicated some ram to EMS, and it was available without a driver. My Toshiba T1200 can do the same thing, and it's 80C86-based; run the setup program and you can dial how much of the available 384K RAM was split between EMS and a non-volatile RAM disk.

As Chuck mentioned, the EMS may not be 4.0, but that may or may not be a problem. I do recall that the 316sx's EMS, while not needing a driver, was pretty slow... it was faster to disable hardware EMS and just have it presented as normal extended memory, then load up QEMM and have it manage all RAM and emulate EMS.