Tried what you've said 5u3 here are the results:

CACHECHK

MEM C/ /P

BIOS

Did you add dos=high on config.sys ?
It seems that dos is taking up too much conventional memory.
On my Pentium PC after running memmaker dos takes just 17kb. In total I have 615kb free.

I would suggest to run memmaker again. Choose Custom Setup in the beginning, choose yes on EMS memory, and try selecting the "Scan the upper memory area aggressively".

Very nice! Your screenshots show that your upper memory blocks have increased to 160 KB, which should be enough for everything.
Now change the DOS=UMB line in your CONFIG.SYS to DOS=UMB,HIGH (like suggested by Jorpho and Markk) and load your mouse driver high (e.g.: LOADHIGH MOUSE.COM).
This should give you enough base memory for anything.

About CACHECHK: I'm not sure why it still comes up with the "This machine seems to have one cache!?" line. The results clearly indicate the presence of a L2 cache, even if it's not much faster than accesses to main memory. Ah, well 🙄

5u3 wrote:

About CACHECHK: I'm not sure why it still comes up with the "This machine seems to have one cache!?" line. The results clearly indicate the presence of a L2 cache, even if it's not much faster than accesses to main memory. Ah, well 🙄

As it is complaining about being run in V86 mode, it appears that it should be run *without* EMM386 (or QEMM or anything else) loaded.

The quick way to bypass all that is to hit F5 when the "Starting MS-DOS" message appears.

Step 1:

As far as I knoıw, you cannot make use of upper memory with a line of "EMM386.EXE RAM". It should read

DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE NOEMS
DOS=HIGH, UMB

Step 2:

Then after that you need to use "DEVICEHIGH=" instead of "DEVICE=" in your config.sys file for loading any additional device drivers, and "LOADHIGH=" for any TSR programs in your autoexec.bat file.

This second step above can be automated by running MEMMAKER, if you wish (and as I also would suggest).

Thanx guys I'm going to try all this and post results!

tayyare wrote:

"LOADHIGH=" for any TSR programs in your autoexec.bat file.

There should not be an equal sign after LOADHIGH (or LH).

To really settle the cache question, run a benchmark like speedsys, or doom 1.9 demo3. Do it with and without external cache enabled. The difference should be enormous. I observed a dramatic increase in benchmarks by increasing my 486DX2's L2 cache from 128 to 256k.

Since cachechk isn't quite giving you the whole story, look at the only thing that matters. Actual real world performance differences in programs that tax the CPU.

tayyare wrote:

As far as I knoıw, you cannot make use of upper memory with a line of "EMM386.EXE RAM".

I think that emm386 is essential in order to access the upper memory area. No matter if the switch used is RAM or NOEMS or a specific amount. If you need EMS, you're probably going to use the RAM switch. If you don't need it, you're going to use the NOEMS switch. It's just that the NOEMS gives you another 64KB of upper memory.

Jorpho wrote:

tayyare wrote:

"LOADHIGH=" for any TSR programs in your autoexec.bat file.

There should not be an equal sign after LOADHIGH (or LH).

Sorry, my mistake, you are right... 😊

Markk wrote:

tayyare wrote:

As far as I knoıw, you cannot make use of upper memory with a line of "EMM386.EXE RAM".

I think that emm386 is essential in order to access the upper memory area. No matter if the switch used is RAM or NOEMS or a specific amount. If you need EMS, you're probably going to use the RAM switch. If you don't need it, you're going to use the NOEMS switch. It's just that the NOEMS gives you another 64KB of upper memory.

As far as I can remember, (did that two years ago last, waiting for some hardware to arrive to start software side of my new retro rigs, so I'm a bit rusty) if you put RAM switch there, there would be so less upper memory available, that almost nothing would be loaded high, and your 640KB will be significantly less than optimal.

Actually memmaker was asking about which you want to chose of these two options, somewhere tru its setup.