I don't think this limit was a highhanded decision of the DOSBox team. There's a reason for this.

As far as I know, 64MB were the limit of the old XMS memory standard.

This affected all Himem.sys versions shipped with the real versions of DOS upto 6.22.

Newer versions of Himem.sys, which are XMS 3.0 compliant, can support up to 4GB of RAM.

But since this requires XMS 3.0 aware programs and DOSBox aims for good DOS 5.0 compatibility,
the limit is set to 64MB.

you could try dosbox-x if you want, it can go up to 512mb i think

https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x

you'll have to compile it yourself though

Jo22 wrote:

But since this requires XMS 3.0 aware programs and DOSBox aims for good DOS 5.0 compatibility,
the limit is set to 64MB.

Why dos 5.0? Dont games like daggerfall reccomend MSDOS 6.0?

Rcj8993 wrote:

Jo22 wrote:

But since this requires XMS 3.0 aware programs and DOSBox aims for good DOS 5.0 compatibility,
the limit is set to 64MB.

Why dos 5.0? Dont games like daggerfall reccomend MSDOS 6.0?

Because DOS 6.x got MemMaker and MSCDEX, I guess.
However, it will also run on DOS 5.

DOS 5/6 do use the almost same kernel. Afaik, there's no game that requires DOS 6,
but some games do check for DOS 5. Here's the reason why DOS 5 was such a success:

Back in June 1991, DOS 5.0 introduced several new features. It was the first one which could
upload itself into UMBs and the HMA, it got a Shell, included himem.sys and EMM386,
DOS 5 also got a few new APIs, several new external commands (undelete and unformat utilities for example),
supported new FAT16 versions, QBasic, added support for 2.88MB floppies, got a better setup, etc.

Or simply said, it was major upgrade for people who came from DOS 3.3 and skipped DOS 4.x (already had some of the stuff above).

To give you an idea, just watch this video.. 😀

Silly MS-DOS 5 Promo Video (High Quality)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxC6PytZMqc

Plus, other OSes like Windows NT and OS/2 Warp do also pretend to have DOS 5.0.

That beeing said, DOSBox allows you to change the version number to anything else anytime.
So it's no issue at all. The DOSBox makers simply wanted to recreate a compatible and authentic
environment these games were used to.

Of course, on a real Pentium machine you can also borrow himem.sys from Win9x and use it in DOS 5/6.
However, this approach does make very little sense in DOSBox. DOSBox keeps the memory limitations of a typical
386/486 machine so older games wouldn't go bonkers. Besides, XMS 3.0 could confuse older games.
Even though I haven't seen this myself and it shouldn't happen, a lot of things can go wrong in computing.
Just remember Murphy's Law: If anything can't go wrong, it will anyway.

486 mobo/BIOS memory limits
http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?342 … S-memory-limits

I hope this post was helpful. I'm a bit sleepy right now, and my English is poor at the moment. I hope you understoot what I meant, anyway. 😀