Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
My favorites were the folks in the Win3.1/9X days complaining that they needed more memory. The problem was that Windows back then had the concept of "resources", that were allocated by applications when they ran. The amount of resources was fixed (two 64K heaps in Win 3.X, one 128K heap in Win9.X,) no matter how much memory was installed. Various applications would allocate resources but not properly free them when they exited, and when resources were exhausted, all you could do was reboot. (Microsoft Excel was a worst offender about not properly freeing resources.)
Getting across the distinction between memory and resources was a challenge. I was delighted to switch to Win2K at home when it was available and those constraints no longer applied.
|
Stop reminding meeeeeeeehhhh (trailing shout after I ran off a cliff, remembering)... This goes right along the same lines as those idiots writing games that require 635K of free main memory. (Back then, a computer was laid out to address 1MB or RAM: 640KB of main memory, 384KB reserved, blah-blah... I'm sure you know.)
The most I've ever been able to free up was 632KB by using QEMM (Quarterdesk Expanded Memory Manager), hand-tuning it after auto-optimization.
I got it to support both EMS (expanded) and XMS (extended) memory above 1MB at the same time, along with everything else: SMARTDRV for cache, MSCDEX for CD-ROM, etc... everything loaded in the space above 640KB. The only thing loaded in main memory was the QEMM driver itself, which took 8KB.
Still one game wouldn't run. Rather than use a boot disk, I just never played it. I don't even remember the name.