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Problem COMMAND.COM low memory

A

aesis

Experienced Member
Joined
Jun 9, 2009
Messages
80
Location
Jesi,Italy
Hello people, it's always me to break the balls :D but I write here because you are very kind educated and also available! :thumbsup:

I installed Ms-Dos 4.01 because the 5.00 in my language (ITA) I did not find it, I installed some games on the disk but to do an example these games are blocked:

Grand Prix Circuit, California Games, Face Off get stuck while going to load and exiting from the game 2 of these tells me that COMMAND.COM no longer has memory ..., what does this warning mean? how do you solve it?

This is the configuration of my PC: Intel 8088-1 10Mhz, 640kb Ram, EGA video card.

Thanks!!
 
DOS 4.0x is a RAM hog. Unless you need hard drive partitions larger than 32 MB I would recommend going back to DOS 3.3.
 
You definitely should be sticking with MS-DOS 3.x and not bothering with 5.0 on an XT. Back in the day I tried 5.0 on my Atari PC 8088 and thought it was great being able to run what was at the time the latest available OS with it's extra features. But it didn't take long until I found out the extra memory footprint it took up stopped my favourites like Civilization and Railroad Tycoon from running with "Out of memory" errors. Went back to 3.21 and all was good again.

If you really absolutely need to run a later DOS version, then this will unfortunately be the trade off.
 
More often than not, error messages about loading command.com after exiting a program are due to the the program trashing the DOS environment in RAM. In some cases the program is just buggy crap and not much can be done. In others, there might be a conflict with loaded drivers, or DOS settings. In some rare cases, even the system BIOS or hardware can play a factor. Although using DOS 4.x doesn't help.

If you are booting from a hard drive, try a "clean" boot configuration. If possible, do test to see how these applications behave under different versions of DOS.

Also, make sure you don't have any stray or mismatched copies of COMMAND.COM sitting around.
 
SomeGuy said:
More often than not, error messages about loading command.com after exiting a program are due to the the program trashing the DOS environment in RAM. In some cases the program is just buggy crap and not much can be done. In others, there might be a conflict with loaded drivers, or DOS settings. In some rare cases, even the system BIOS or hardware can play a factor. Although using DOS 4.x doesn't help.

If you are booting from a hard drive, try a "clean" boot configuration. If possible, do test to see how these applications behave under different versions of DOS.

Also, make sure you don't have any stray or mismatched copies of COMMAND.COM sitting around.
Click to expand...

Thanks to everyone for the help you are very generous without you how would I do? Thanks again!

First I had to install Ms-Dos 4 to run a hard disk of 13GB with XT-IDE card now the disk is 2GB, I can not return to Ms-Dos 3.30 because it does not see a Hard Disk exceeding 32MB True? Correct me if I'm wrong!

I often see games with the COMMAND.COM file inside it, so there's more than one COMMAND.COM inside the Hard Disk, could this be the cause of the Crash?
 
aesis said:
First I had to install Ms-Dos 4 to run a hard disk of 13GB with XT-IDE card now the disk is 2GB, I can not return to Ms-Dos 3.30 because it does not see a Hard Disk exceeding 32MB True? Correct me if I'm wrong!
Click to expand...

From what I understand the special Compaq version MS-DOS 3.31 doesn't have the 32MB limitation however I do believe it is limited to 512MB.

Honestly 512MB is more than plenty for an XT.
 
Being able to address issues like this is one of the reasons I'm setting up my XT to have CF cards that can be accessed from outside the case instead of actual hard drives. With a different card for each operating system you want to try out or use you can switch between versions as fast as you can shut down, power off, swap a card, and reboot.
 
DDS said:
Being able to address issues like this is one of the reasons I'm setting up my XT to have CF cards that can be accessed from outside the case instead of actual hard drives. With a different card for each operating system you want to try out or use you can switch between versions as fast as you can shut down, power off, swap a card, and reboot.
Click to expand...
Wow...I've been doing exactly that for over 30 years with floppies. :)
 
aesis said:
I often see games with the COMMAND.COM file inside it, so there's more than one COMMAND.COM inside the Hard Disk, could this be the cause of the Crash?
Click to expand...

Yes.

It's also possible you are running games that are initially configured for VGA, but you only have an EGA card, that may also explain why the game is hanging on startup. Always configure your games.
 
Trixter said:
Yes.

It's also possible you are running games that are initially configured for VGA, but you only have an EGA card, that may also explain why the game is hanging on startup. Always configure your games.
Click to expand...

Of course, when I send, for example, Grand Prix Circuit (GP.EXE), he immediately asks me what system I have, I have tried many times EGA and also CGA but the game crashes too!
I managed to install F-Prot 2.27, and 4 times out of 10 when I start the pc tells me:
Error in the DISPLAY.SYS file and if I remember correctly it gives me a random "error in the code page"
This has been doing since I installed F-Prot!
Do you have any ideas?
 
This is the message that gives me when I load Dos 4.01:

invalid syntax in the control program display.sys

then after loading the message "Ms-Dos 4.01 gives me this other error:

code table operation not supported by this device
 
Remove any DISPLAY lines from your config.sys and try again. Your DOS may not be in Italian after you reboot, but it will remove the error.

It's possible something is getting loaded (like FASTOPEN) that could be causing problems. You can try renaming your CONFIG.SYS to CONFIG.DIS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to AUTOEXEC.DIS and reboot and see if that helps.

DOS 4.x was a very bad version of DOS. You should be running either 3.3, or 5.0, or 6.22, or PC-DOS 7.0. These have the best ratio of memory usage and features. If your hard disk is small, you should try to reload with MS-DOS 3.3.
 
Trixter said:
Remove any DISPLAY lines from your config.sys and try again. Your DOS may not be in Italian after you reboot, but it will remove the error.

It's possible something is getting loaded (like FASTOPEN) that could be causing problems. You can try renaming your CONFIG.SYS to CONFIG.DIS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to AUTOEXEC.DIS and reboot and see if that helps.
Click to expand...

Do you load FASTOPEN.EXE but could you remove it from config.sys?

What's the point of having it and I did not have it loaded?

Trixter said:
DOS 4.x was a very bad version of DOS. You should be running either 3.3, or 5.0, or 6.22, or PC-DOS 7.0. These have the best ratio of memory usage and features. If your hard disk is small, you should try to reload with MS-DOS 3.3.
Click to expand...

My disk is 13GB reduced to 2GB with XT-IDE Glitch card
 
You can't have a completely empty CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT under DOS 4.01. SHARE.EXE needs to be loaded with disks larger than 32 MB. Really kills free memory space since most of SHARE isn't needed when not running a network.

Could you post the contents of CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT? Might simplify things if we know how DOS was setup.
 
Autoexec.bat:

@echo off
set comspec=c:\dos\command.com
verify off
path c:\dos
append /e
append c:\dos
prompt $p$g
ver
mode con cp prep=((850) c:\dos\ega.cpi)
keyb it,,c:\dos\keyboard.sys /id:141
chcp 437

config.sys:

Break=on
country=39,,c:\dos\country.sys
buffers=20
files=20
lastdrive=e
shell=c:\dos\command.com /p /e:256
device=c:\f-prot\virstop.exe
device=c:\dos\ansi.sys
device=c:\dos\display.sys con=(ega,437,1)
install=c:\dos\keyb.com us,,c:\dos\keyboard.sys
install=c:\dos\fastopen.exe c:=(50,25)
install=c:\dos\nlsfunc.exe c:\dos\country.sys
 
aesis said:
My disk is 13GB reduced to 2GB with XT-IDE Glitch card
Click to expand...
You might also consider MS-DOS 3.31. Same low memory usage as DOS 3.3, but can access drives up to 512MB. However, I am not aware of any Italian language versions floating around.
 
Remove the red lines from config.sys, they take up memory without providing a useful function (you don't need antivirus on a 30-yr-old computer!). After you do that, reboot, and then type "chkdsk c: /f" and report back the number of bytes of free memory chkdsk tells you.

aesis said:
Autoexec.bat:

@echo off
set comspec=c:\dos\command.com
verify off
path c:\dos
append /e
append c:\dos
prompt $p$g
ver
mode con cp prep=((850) c:\dos\ega.cpi)
keyb it,,c:\dos\keyboard.sys /id:141
chcp 437

config.sys:

Break=on
country=39,,c:\dos\country.sys
buffers=20
files=20
lastdrive=e
shell=c:\dos\command.com /p /e:256
device=c:\f-prot\virstop.exe
device=c:\dos\ansi.sys
device=c:\dos\display.sys con=(ega,437,1)
install=c:\dos\keyb.com us,,c:\dos\keyboard.sys
install=c:\dos\fastopen.exe c:=(50,25)
install=c:\dos\nlsfunc.exe c:\dos\country.sys
Click to expand...
 
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