DOS gaming: 386DX40 with 16mb or 32mb.

[barney]

I can vouch for XMSDSK. It works very well, and I utilized it extensively for several years. Plus you can make it use the top of memory, rather than the bottom, so it'll work with Windows 95/98 if you want. Not that you'd be running either of those on your 386, most likely.

But yeah, a ramdisk makes running DOS programs a lot faster. Stuff loads and saves instantly. And little, if any, 386-era (or even 486-era) DOS software required or even utilized more than about 4 MB of RAM. 4 MB was the standard for a long time, and most people who ran Windows 3.1 when it was mainstream ran it with 8 MB. On a strictly DOS machine, you'd be just fine leaving 4 MB free for programs and using whatever you have above that for a disk cache and a ramdisk.

How big of a XMSDISK should I set up on my computer? My system has 16MB RAM.

 

[luckybob]

if it was up to me, I wouldn't go over 1/4 of your total ram. Therefore; 4mb is what I would do in your case.