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Question regarding DOSBox RAM settings

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First post, by Freddo

Posted on 
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Thanks to the 16bit support moe's unofficial win32 build I've been able to run Battlespire.

Anyway, when I start Battlespire I get a message saying

Starting Battlespire... […]
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Starting Battlespire...

Warning: 31M RAM+Swap detected.

Battlespire has detected less than the desired amount of memory
available to the game. The is ost likely due to the DPI memory
setting of your DOS box. Please read the 'patch.txt' file and pay
close attention to the 'Random Crashes' section.

It is also likely that you may be low on disk space. We recommend
that you have at least 40 megabytes of free space on your hard disk
before running Battlespire.

If you decide to continue playing the game, there is a *VERY* good
chance that it *WILL* crash.

[Hit 'q' to stop loading the game or any other key to continue...]

And in the DOSBox.conf file I have memsize=64 and tried various options with xms=true/false and ems=true/false and used the normal core. The solution in the PATCH.TXT file only refer to the DOS memory settings with Windows 9x .pif files so it's no go.

I've been able to run the game fine (the little I've played because even with the dynamic core it's too slow for my current computer), but I rather not let the game use a 40MB swapfile when it should be possible to avoid it.

Any idea what I can do to make the software see more RAM so I get a "Good: 55+ RAM and swap detected" result?

Reply 1 of 3, by dougdahl

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Long ago I used to run Battlespire on my dos system. I installed one of the patches and afterwards I got that same error or a very similar one every time I ran the game. Which was strange since before I installed the patch I never got the message and my computer had about 64 Megs (or so I recall). It has been a while so my recollections may not be totally accurate.

I wonder if perhaps it may be a problem with how the game is detecting memory. I seem to recall it was after Win95 came out and the error message includes "your DOS box." which tended to be a Windows reference at the time and not a dos one. Perhaps the game is looking for Windows resources and upon not finding them triggering the error.
...
I just searched a bit and I came across a website about one of the patches
http://static.bethsoft.com/downloads/patches/batpat15.txt
(perhaps this is the same file that you have) and for the error it mentions various problems regarding such things as contiguous hard space, virtual memory swap files, and DPMI settings. No idea if it is even possible to do anything about these in dos.

Reply 2 of 3, by Freddo

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Thanks for the reply 😀

I, too, have a DOS computer with 64MB and get the "Good: 55+ RAM and swap detected" on that one (in pure DOS not using Windows). But with DOSBox I somehow only get the "Warning: 31M RAM+Swap detected." message, no matter what.

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