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Originally Posted by Katsunami
Stop remembering 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.)
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Yep. I started out on the original IBM-PC with MSDOS 2.1.
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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.
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I'm not a gamer, so didn't feel that pain.
I still have my first home PC sitting on a shelf. It was a clone that I gave a 10mhz motherboard with a NEC V20 CPU, and an AST 6-PAK card with a MB of addon RAM. 512K was allocated as a ramdisk, 256K as a disk cache, and 256K was EMS for applications that could use it.
I had a Hercules graphics card driving a mono amber monitor. I found a freeware app that could allocate unused video memory to main memory, and the Hercules card left 64K of video memory unused, so I booted to a system that thought it had 704K free DOS memory.
I have a Unix machine at home before I go the PC (I still have it - an AT&T 3B1), and wanted the PC set up as much like Unix as possible. I bought a package called the MKS Toolkit that had DOS versions of all of the Unix commands that made sense in a single-user, single tasking environment. The killer tool for me was a DOS version of the Korn shell., my preferred shell on Unix, that had everything save asynchronous background processes (because DOS didn't
do that.)
Installed in fullest Unix compatibility mode, the Toolkit substituted INIT.EXE for COMMAND.COM as the boot shell. INIT loaded and put up a Login: screen. Enter a userid and optional password, and INIT called LOGIN, which looked up the ID is a Unix compatible /etc'/passwd file, and it it found a match, changed to the ID's defined home directory and ran what was defined as that ID's shell. I had IDs that ran the MKS Korn shell, vanilla COMMAND.COM, the 4DOS shareware COMMAND.COM replacement, and Desqview. Exit the shell, and INIT was reloaded. I could change environments without rebooting. RAMdisk, disk cache and the like were all set up in CONFIG.SYS and common to all environments.
I kept the setup when I moved to Win 3.1. The default shell for Win3.1 was Program Manager, but others existed. Which it used was determined by an entry in the SYSTEM.INI file. I had MKS IDs that would copy the appropriate SYSTEM.INI file I wanted over the real one and then run Windows, or I could dispense with Windows and just boot to DOS.
Tricky to set up, but worked fine.
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Dennis