VOGONS


Reply 21 of 35, by AdamP

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Have you seen this?

Another thing about real EMS is that it's probably a lot slower than emulated, seeing as it uses an 8-bit ISA interface.

Another thing that may or may not help is to specify a range for UMB and EMS in the RAM switch of your EMM386 line.

Reply 22 of 35, by Dominus

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You might just not be able to due to the board spent resources ;(

Windows 3.1x guide for DOSBox
60 seconds guide to DOSBox
DOSBox SVN snapshot for macOS (10.4-11.x ppc/intel 32/64bit) notarized for gatekeeper

Reply 23 of 35, by Malik

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F2bnp, I forgot to ask how much ram you have in your system.

1. Try to reduce the total RAM available, by using programs like the xmsdsk to allocate most of the ram to a virtual drive, and to leave the remaining for DOS. Try reducing in steps - 512MB, 256MB, 128MB and finally 64MB of available extended memory (increase the xmsdsk usage). Before resorting to this, :

2. Before doing that, did you set the MEMMAKER to run with custom settings or was it run at the default settings? If you choose custom, select the "use the monochrome region" thingy and "scan the upper memory area aggressively" options.

3. Most probably will require manual adjustments.

4. Looking at your basic empty MSD.EXE output, you can try using the switch

a.) I=C000-EFFF (which will include the "possibly available" areas.

or

b.) I=D000-DFFF (where this whole region is absolutely free for the page frame, again from your MSD.EXE output.)

And remove other switches.

5. And also, if your BIOS has the options, Enable the "Shadow RAM" options, if available.

Even in my 486 with 8MB RAM, I ended up manually adjusting the settings of the EMM386 switches, to optimize the upper memory usage - which the MEMMAKER failed to compute.

5476332566_7480a12517_t.jpgSB Dos Drivers

Reply 25 of 35, by F2bnp

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AdamP wrote:
Malik wrote:

F2bnp, I forgot to ask how much ram you have in your system.

Judging by his mem /c output, I'm guessing he has about 1GB.

Yeah I'm pretty sure I have 1GB (too bored to actually turn the PC on and have a look 😜)

Reply 26 of 35, by F2bnp

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So I tried UMBPCI in conjuction with EMM386, I tried a ton of different stuff and it still wouldn't work (everything from not booting Windows at all to not running games), so I decided to give up. It's not worth it anyway, I can everything through Win9x DOS prompt and DOSBox.
Thanks for all the help anyway guys 😁

Reply 28 of 35, by jwt27

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Whoa, you do give up quickly.

Did you even try disabling EMS? With UMBPCI only and no EMM386? I really doubt you need it anyway. Did you change the load order, did you read the readmes?
And if you really really do need EMS, there's always JEMM386 that does not use all of your conventional memory.

Reply 30 of 35, by F2bnp

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Yes, I do give up quickly, because I do not have a ton of time to spare unfortunately and DOS configuration always pissed me off. The reason I wanted real DOS was to listen to how different some games sound with the Vortex's SBPRO emulation, which in itself is kinda maschochistic 😜

But to answer to your questions:
-El_Pusher, unfortunately this board does not provide enough options (I guess because it's an Albatron) so no option for RAM shadowing.

-Jwt27, I do need EMS. Quite a few games outright demand it. Frontier Elite II is one of those. It's also the game in particular I wanted to listen to how it sounds like when using that shitty SBPRO emulation from the Vortex cards. I used to play it like that a year or so ago and it sounded quite nice actually, so I wanted to listen to it again 😜
UMBPCI works indeed and I can go to Windows GUI and all, also gives me quite a bit of RAM. I think, without the MSCDEX and CDROM drivers loaded I had about 593, which is enough. I tried loading EMM386 after UMBPCI but the system wouldn't boot into the GUI, always complaining about some file not working due to RAM issues. I tried a plethora of /I switches (I used UMBCHK to determine which addresses I should try) and one of them supposedly made it work, but games would hang before even getting to actual gameplay.

-Bestemor, nope, gave up before even looking for it 😜

I'm dual booting anyway, Win98 and WinXP, I'm pretty sure all of the DOS games work just fine under DOSBox, except for those ones that have support for some really high resolutions like System Shock (when using a fan patch) and MechWarrior II. I also play pretty much all of my Windows games on Windows XP. Windows 98 is there mostly for those pesky ones that just won't work and to remind me that this is supposed to be a retro rig xD

Reply 31 of 35, by Malik

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F2bnp, here's a last-effort move to maximize your available conventional memory :

1. Remark OUT / Remove the COUNTRY.SYS and the DISPLAY.SYS lines in the config.sys. They are not required for games. And they do take up some memory space.

2. Replace that messy ducks....errr...I mean MSCDEX.EXE. Use SHCDX33C.EXE or the latest version SHCDX33E.EXE instead. It takes up about only one-third of the mscdex.exe.

3. REDUCE the FILES= value to 30 or 40. Or remark it out, unless a game requests for it. Remove BUFFERS= statement or reduce it to 30, 20 or 10.

4. Remove the LASTDRIVE= statement unless you have many drives letters. You don't need it if you have drives upto the letter G or H, if I'm not mistaken. Or you can reduce the letter count to the actual last drive in your system.

The biggest culprit here is that ducks - the messy ducks. 😁

You'll be surprised with the results! 😀

5476332566_7480a12517_t.jpgSB Dos Drivers

Reply 32 of 35, by Jorpho

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I'm pretty sure mdgx.com has some CD-ROM drivers that take up just a little bit less RAM than the Oak drivers, but should still work with other CD-ROM drives.

Reply 33 of 35, by Albercik

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Hi Everyone!

I know it's an old thread, but I have a problem regarding an issue described here: "Not enough memory to run this program".

I used EMM with NOEMS parameter and everything was working fine. But I have recently added a SB Live! card and the SB16 emulation requires EMS (othewise - the computer won't even boot).

What's odd - mem shows:
Conventional 720K
Upper 0K
Reserved 0K

My rig is a Gigabyte GA-6BXC with Intel Pentium II 450MHz processor and 640MB RAM.

The program I'm trying to run is Lotus III The Utlimate Challenge game.

Thank you in advance!
Tom

P MMX 166MHz, 64 MB, S3 Trio64V2/DX, SB Vibra 16 ISA, 40GB HDD
P III 650MHz, 640 MB, nVidia Riva TNT2, SB 16 ISA, 120GB HDD
486 DX2 66MHz, 16 MB, Trident TVGA8900C, SB Vibra 16 ISA, 2GB CF

Reply 34 of 35, by Jorpho

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There is at least one virus known to cause such problems, so you might want to rule that out.
What the...??! my UMB blocks have dissapeared!

I don't know what you mean when you say "the computer won't even boot". What happens if you comment out the line in autoexec.bat that loads SBINIT.COM (or SBEINIT.COM) and then run it manually afterwards?

Reply 35 of 35, by Albercik

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Thank you @Jorpho for the reply.

I'd rather exclude the virus as a) this is a fresh system, b) when I'll comment out SB drivers and add NOEMS option back - everything works fine (of course, except for the sound 😉 ).

By "the computer won't even boot" I mean that if I'll leave sbeinit in autoexec.bat and simultanously I'll add NOEMS param - the computer reboots by itself on sbeinit execution and don't even allow me to access the shell. Thank to M$ I have W98 startup floppy 😉

Honestly... I haven't thought of loading it manually. I'll give it a try today evening and I'll post the results.

Tom

P MMX 166MHz, 64 MB, S3 Trio64V2/DX, SB Vibra 16 ISA, 40GB HDD
P III 650MHz, 640 MB, nVidia Riva TNT2, SB 16 ISA, 120GB HDD
486 DX2 66MHz, 16 MB, Trident TVGA8900C, SB Vibra 16 ISA, 2GB CF