Yoghoo wrote on 2024-05-04, 14:51:

For the "insufficient environment size" error edit your config.sys and add/change this line: SHELL=c:\command.com /e:1024.

Thank you! I will give this a try tonight. I have no idea what that effects. Never have seen that suggestion before. I'll try to study up.

I too have noticed it might be more about juggling / musical chairs, with various boot modes to switch out. I like Phil's starter kit, which does a good job of also showing an example. Appears straight forward to start making my own.

The memory management side of DOS became back in the day of DOS primetime, a matter of availability and obscurantism:
Only a few options were locally known and available. You must consider that the internet was not as widespread and
common as it is today. We had mostly Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and our local computer club/computer
buddies/computer libraries, and that was it. So you probably had the memory manager which came with your DOS or
hardware (if any), and then a couple more to choose from. Reputation by word of mouth and available conventional
memory was all that mattered when selecting from the few that you knew and could get your hands of.

The scenario is quite different now:
You can have access to almost all available memory managers, which covers a vast range of options. There are several
aspects to consider which were not a thing back then, like support for what in DOS terms would be called insane amounts
of memory (in the gigabytes range), which many managers fail to handle. Stability is a subject on its own, and is often
overshadowed by personal experience/perception which is never a good advisor.

Many memory managers resorted to playing nasty tricks with the PC memory mapping to gain a few extra kilobytes, and this
came at the cost of risking the system to a crash when a program did some unconventional thing (which many did for a
fact), or even because a hardware manufacturer decided they knew better than the rest.

Then you have what I would define as "bleeding edge memory managers", which are still receiving updates. They boast a
list of impressive features that you would have never dreamed of, which includes running also extremely cool and
novel software develoments. But their biggest flaw is that their backwards compatibility is compromised by a few
notable software packages which have troubles with them. The good side of this is that their authors are reachable,
the bad is that some do not feel the need to address these shortcomings for unknown reasons.

My personal preference, is that if you have a 386 or better processor, to always stay with the memory manager that
came with the DOS flavor you use. But don't be shy of updating it to its latest version. On lower end systems, the
matter gets more complicated since you will have to pay a great deal of attention to the underlying hardware to make a
safe choice, and it may require plenty of manual fine-tuning to get you there.

The best advice here would be for you to implement a series of tests, involving memory demanding and hacky programs,
and then to draw conclusions from there by using a preselected set of memory managers which you deemed interesting.
And remember, these conclusions will only be valid for your particular software and hardware combination, not as a
general rule, as it will most certainly be, bad advice for others.

MiNiDOS wrote on 2024-05-04, 18:33:

The memory management side of DOS became back in the day of DOS primetime, a matter of availability and obscurantism: Only a fe […]
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The memory management side of DOS became back in the day of DOS primetime, a matter of availability and obscurantism:
Only a few options were locally known and available. You must consider that the internet was not as widespread and
common as it is today. We had mostly Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and our local computer club/computer
buddies/computer libraries, and that was it. So you probably had the memory manager which came with your DOS or
hardware (if any), and then a couple more to choose from. Reputation by word of mouth and available conventional
memory was all that mattered when selecting from the few that you knew and could get your hands of.

Well, that's right as far as most people are being regarded.
But technically, there also were online services, FidoNet and the early internet places (Usenet). Radio amateurs had their own Packet-Radio network, too.

CompuServe was notable insofar, as it had been popular as some sort of international BBS.
All the popular tech companies were around here. Microsoft, Intel, IBM or Apple.
So users had looked/asked for help there, if they had issues with their computer or software.
It also offered a chat room (CB Simulator) long before IRC or ICQ were around.

It also had offered international e-mail exchange since the 80s.
Most readme files that come with DOS programs of the 80s have a compuserve e-mail address being mentioned.

Even here in Europe CompuServe was known very well, despite CompuServe being pretty much an US-only service between early 80s and early 90s.

In order to access CompuServe, we had to use a gateway available in our country to access CompuServe mainframes located in the US.

Often, the major online service in a given country had offered an X.25 gateway to other "databases" around globe (CompuServe being on of them).

In my country, it was T-Online (aka BTX, Datex-J), an Videotex member, which had offered X.25 access.
That being said, Datex-P was the better alternative in my country, though; it was a pure X.25 packet network.

Speaking of online services, there were other online services such as Genie, Q-Link, Prodigy, and many more.

Here's an article of zdnet about the early online services:
https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/network … nline-services/

Again, there's nothing wrong with what you said. It's just that many people seem to forget or don't know about this part of history.

Communication technology was there since the C64 days, to those people that really had a need for it.
Normal citizen weren't the main customers, of course. But ATMs, banks, power grids or communications companies. Such things.

Likewise, internet and e-mail exchange had existed since the 70s, but it wasn't open to the public yet.
But still, research facilities, universities and students had access to it early on.
So researchers could exchange information internationally globally early on.

Independently of the internet, there also were the international "databases" around the globe.
They were being based on telephone networks, using X.25 protocol.

They used virtual connections, essentially.
So a permanent computer connection could be held, despite the physical connection being changing.

So if you're watching original Tron movie, it's not about the early internet, but X.25 networks, maybe.
X.25 networks were popular circa mid-70s to late 80s.

Edit: Big libraries might have been another "customer" of early networks.

I remember connecting to the library in New York many years ago, via telnet.
I assume that big libraries had a similar access for X.25 many moons ago.

Because, in order to access X.25 networks, a serial terminal and an acoustic coupler/modem was all it needed. It was not different to a telnet experience, all in all.

The local gateway, the X.25 PAD, did all the baud rate conversion and hand-shaking stuff.
During connection, merely a dot (.) and return (enter) had to be typed in (for auto-baud detection).

This is why I love this forum. Getting some excellent history and insight from the past compared to now. I did spend some time on BBS's in highschool. Loved ever bit of it. It really was a who you know advantage. Thank you so much for ALL of that detail. I will start with EMM386 only then, on this Pentium III / 256MB memory system, and explore what I can with it and tweaking.

Yoghoo wrote on 2024-05-04, 14:51:

For the "insufficient environment size" error edit your config.sys and add/change this line: SHELL=c:\command.com /e:1024.

This certainly resolved the error. Thank you!

QEMM back in the days was the only way to get darn Lemmings 2 to work with Sound Blaster effects on my 386. Nowadays, QEMM is able to run Curse of Enchantia on my Pentium MMX. No other configuration was able to make it run.
I don't use QEMM by default, but I do respect it 🙂

QEMM was indispensible in the MS-DOS 5.0 days when DOS's own memory management was kind of mediocre. Startup menus and QEMM being one of the options was almost necessary to be able to run some games at all.

Well, strictly speaking both EMS boards and those 8-Bit "ISA" UMB cards with SRAM did exist back then.
The c't Magazine had published some schematics. I've got one, really works: Re: 80x86/Vxx PC emulators with x87, EMS, UMBs and no artificial 640KiB limit ?

But yes, to the majority of people, memory managers were the solution.
If they had an 386 or higher processor.

Edit: I think it was DR DOS 5 which had introduced HMA and UMB support in DOS itself.
MS-DOS 5, released afterwards, was essentially the answer to it.
It's a bit like with AMD Mantle, which had Microsoft forced to do something and release DX12/D3D12.