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hardware or software?

Now that I think about it, when I was setting a dos box few months back I had to comment out all the networking guf. Was also causing memmaker to fail on the final restart. The thing would just hang similar to what's happening to your machine. Ended up using the mTCP suite and a packet driver for networking.

I bet you're lucky to have 360-420k conventional memory free with all that stuff loaded.
 
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Agreed that mTCP is the way to go for networking. The same for using shsucdx instead of mscdex, and jemmex instead of both himem.sys and emm386. To my mind, the only reason for using the older (generally inferior) programs is for historical accuracy - which could be a good one though. :)

As for memmaker, I agree with deathshadow. It is dysfunctional. It can be educational, and works for simple systems where you don't need to use it, but it doesn't work when you have a lot of programs. I've found that, without getting fancy, simply putting "LH" in front of programs works more often than memmaker. I have 15 resident programs and still have a 24K upper memory block left. Even smartdrv went up there without complaining. There's 629,408 bytes of conventional memory left for programs! I don't think memmaker could do that for me. Anyway, unless one has experience with a particular setup, it is always best to add things one at a time. Putting it all in there and just crossing one's fingers is not a particularly technical approach in my opinion.
 
kbit said:
it works fine without network { no boot rom on card} but it will not work with network
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That's why I was thinking the networking as a possible cause... DOS networking is... fragile. There's a lot of things that it just doesn't play well with -- it's why during the 3.1 era I had built multiple boot menu options for DOS 6 -- one with EMS, one without EMS, one with networking...

Actually, instead of auto, you could try noEMS. the EMS page frame could be interfering with the network stack.

device=C:\windows\emm386.exe noems ram /I=B000-B7FF

see if you can get networking up with that option enabled. Not a lot of software uses EMS in the first place, and that will still provide you with working UMB and XMS management...

Personally, I'm wary of third party EMM solutions -- QEMM for example you spend more time micromanaging configurations than you do actually having software work -- and I STILL haven't had any version of JEMMX work in anything EXCEPT freedos...

Which FreeDOS is cute, I've not found it particularly reliable or deployable anywhere except inside a VM... and it's more of a memory hog than 6.22; which is saying something! I often wonder if FreeDOS incorrectly reports more RAM free than there really is, as I get heap overflow errors in my TP programs all the time in FD, when they're just fine in the real deal. (even when checking memavail -- memavail says 500k free, I try to allocate 32k to a pointer and it says heap overflow?) -- maybe it just has crappier garbage collection on INT $21/AH=$48/$49/$4A
 
I haven't had much luck with FreeDOS either. I had hoped that the utilities were better, but most have turned out flaky. I stick to MS-DOS 6.22 since it seems the most solid to me. (3.3 for old kit) Not the utilities though - just the 3 OS files. Most of my utilites are from Simtel or PC-Mag. A couple of MS ones are hard to beat though, particularly the MEM.EXE. I've tried literally dozens of others and that one is still the most functional for me. The JEMMEX is from Germany http://www.japheth.de/ and he's got some other interesting programs there. I've been using it for a long time now and it does have the odd glitch which it could be responsible for, although I have stretched my machine to the point where it is more likely my fault. Anyway the bottom line is that it works for what I do in DOS which is text processing and networking. Images and audio get relegated to the *nix world where that functionality shines.
 
To OP:

Is EMM386 actually needed for anything on the machine? I usually don't load it unless its actually needed for something.
 
lutiana said:
Interesting, I've had great luck with using it in MS-DOS 6.22 and PC-DOS 6 and 7.
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To be fair, all these 'newer' DOS proggies -- freedos, jemmex, etc... I've had horrible luck with on 'real hardware' -- they're FINE in a VM, but the moment I try to put them on the real deal they fall apart miserably.

In the case of JEMMX on my 386/40 it refuses to even let the machine start, on my 266MMX it starts, but you try to run anything that uses XMS or EMS it crashes, on my K6/2-450 it prevents windows from even starting with this massive debug dump output... and on my Athlon 600 it also seems to start up fine, but when running it the machine just randomly crashes at odd intervals. For freeDOS my results are quite similar for pretty much anything that's an exectutable separate from the OS...

While on those machines DOS 5/6.22 and Win 3.1/95/98 are rock solid.

Besides, since the heaviest configured of those machines reports 601k free (the normal machines reporting 621k) I'm not really worried about it.

njroadfan said:
To OP:

Is EMM386 actually needed for anything on the machine? I usually don't load it unless its actually needed for something.
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It's a good point -- depends on how much DOS stuff is being run. Many DOS extenders require a XMS handler in place... but if you're not planning on running anything like that (Borland Paradox for DOS, some later games), it's not entirely necessary.... though the provision of UMB's for loading more than just the dos kernel into the HMA is often the reason people use it.

It's why I used to have three boot configs built using a config.sys menu... one with XMS and EMS, one with just XMS, and one 'clean/minimalist' for running windows.
 
had a bit of a time getting a memory test to work, finally found memtest86 ver3.5b and it works{testing as i write}. as i recall from yesteryear , different config setups were quite common depending on what you planned to use computer for.{how times change} found a using dos 6.22 book at a local 2nd hand store {now i have several hundred pages of stuff i don`t understand,ha,ha} so i have lots of {slow} learning to do. i plan on mostly storing this old computer but it will be used for old games {still a few that i enjoy} and network use often enough to keep it running well. so i`ll test ram and try different suggestions from you guys , and see what happens.
 
solved! changed cpu , no more errors! emm386 still hung , checked mem /c/p , removed msdlc protocol , emm386 works , loads stuff into upper memory now, network works great, ie5 is more functional {no more crashes} , haven`t tried too much but seems to be good to go! give me a month or so and i should know dos much better. found cpu { in my experince too many errors = bad hardware} because i got a divide overflow error { so i rechecked hardware, found loose pins, changed cpu} now to optimize !!thanks guys!
 
back to 486dx@33mhz, i don`t want to take any chances and am using only "approved cpus" { sx to dx2 , printed on the board} the dx2 had the damaged pins ,and while it worked "ok" it did not allow proper access to ram. my internet has been spotty { weather!} but photo soon!
 
sticker.jpg
sticker on bottom

front.jpg
front

msd.jpg
screenshot of msd

canon.jpg
surfing with opera!

vintage.jpg
and this is what website looks like on old stuff!
 
A good example of PCs of the period. A good thing is you can play with a nice selection of software, both OSs and applications. If you wanted to take advantage of the greater capacity of the hard drives it's worth considering overlay software. I've got 3 486s, one is dedicated to OS/2 v3 just to be different, one for MSDos/win 3.x and the other a hack to play with linux/NT3.x/NT4/other dos variants networked to other machines of various types.

It shouldn't be too hard to aquire another 486DX2/66 or thereabouts chip. Placing an ad in the wanted section is an option.
 
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