So I meanwhile checked some of the proposed solutions. Unfortunately nothing worked:

1. Dos4gvm variables and virtual memory setting. No impact. Checked with pmode (attachment)
2. Qemm DPMI virtual memory. Did not increase available memory with pmode - available overall memory did not increase
3. Win311: also no way. Games didn’t even start. And mem only showed 2mb free memory no matter what I entered.

Anyway I have to admit that I tested everything with 32mb installed and tried to simulate little memory via smartdrv / lbacache. That might have impacted my test cases negatively. As soon as I get my old 386 mobo online again I will check with 2mb physical memory.

But I identified that games with pmode needed around 250kb less memory to start (tested with qfg4).

Cheers

Considering that swapping to disk on a system likely running a slow disk in PIO mode (which is both slow and CPU intensive) would likely be excruciatingly slow gameplay wise if it worked, you are probably not missing much.

EDIT: It would still have been a nice proof of concept if it worked, but it likely would have been unusable in actual practice .

Update ah I’m excited.

Tested now with my 386sx using only 2mb physical RAM installed.

And yes.... it’s working with qemm /qdpmi and pmode extender. Incredible. I am happy 😀)))

Update:

Doom2: starting and running. Playable: 0%
QfG4: starting and running. Quite ok some loading time for texts and so an. But crashes after the first text window ingame. Might be a game issue since I think I had the same issue with emm386+32mb ram