AMIBIOS, 1992, on a 486 motherboard (Contaq chipset), offers Enable or Disable for "Main Memory Relocation," but I can't figure out what the heck it does. It is not listed in DBOG. The only mention I have found so far is in documentation for URAM, which said to disable it but did not explain further. Thanks for any help.
ISA go Bragh™
ftp://ftp.megatrends.com/archive/Other_Manuals/
The manual should be there somewhere. Just keep in mind they are in Wordperfect for DOS 5.1 format.
Usually 'memory relocation' in that era remaps the 384kb of upper memory above the first megabyte so you can use it as extended memory.
If you have any adapter ROMs in your system, like a controller card which gives LBA hard disk support, or a network card's Boot ROM, you can enable this feature to gain a small amount of extended memory.
If you don't have any adapter ROMs, and are using a memory manager like EMM386 to provide upper memory blocks, and load drivers high in your config.sys/autoexec.bat, leave this disabled.
If you are squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble.
Thanks for the replies. The best matching documentation from the cited FTP site (CTQ596A.Z11 for Contaq 82C596 A) ... as well as the on-line help in setup that I previously did not notice, duh ... agrees with that description. Empirically, however, I could find no actual difference in the amount of extended memory appearing.
OTOH, the following sentence appears in the documentation for the earlier 593 chipset: "This option is automatically disabled if more than 12 MB of DRAM is installed on the motherboard." It seems likely that something similar applies but was not documented. Come to think of it, with 32 MiB on board, the motherboard may be physically incapable of extending the address space any further.
ISA go Bragh™
Maybe its ROM shadowing? My Micronics EISA board has a similar limitation in that it can't shadow ROMs when more than 16MB of RAM is installed in the machine due to it mapping the ROMs into an area just above the 16MB boundary.
