Here is a description of the configuration of notebook:

iCeleron Mobil 2,4GHz
256MB RAM
SiS 645DX Chipset
ATi Radeon 9000 Mobility 64 MB VRAM (not shared with system RAM)
Sigmatel C-Major Audio
WindowsXP Professional
VDMSound 2.1.0 Beta

Hmmm...
...it seems that I have no EMS available in WinXP

I added line EMM=RAM to config.nt and edited _default.pif to allocate EMS but with no effect. EMS also not listed in the MEM.EXE listing.

😒/

Maybe some EMS emulation (driver) could be added in the future versions of VDMSound (Microsoft solution of WinXP EMS support is VERY poor actually).

I searched Google for EMS WXP support and I found that there are many machines, on which isn't ANY EMS support and the settings have not any influence on this 😒

http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/emsxp.html

Sorry Ben, I don't think VDMSound or any other kind of 3rd party driver/utility can "magically" ad EMS to Microsoft' NTVDM.EXE.

Have you tried disabling non-essential, on-board devices in your BIOS? Disabling the Ethernet controller on my nForce2 board gave me EMS back in WinXP.

Btw. Battle Isle 2 works fine in DOSBox.

Re: Cannot enable EMS under Win2K...

EMS memory and XP

Noone said anything about adding ems support to ntvdm. The obvious solution is to develop a driver that emulates ems paged addressing over xms for use with vdmsound. DOSBOX does that, it emulates it perfectly (though I have not actualy checked the codewhen it comes to the technique used used). I also have the same ems problem since the motherboard's bios uses the i/o range for the on-board gigabit ethernet nic. Disabling it is not an option. I use dosbox for ems only games but I don't like how cpu throttling is coded in dosbox.Dropping cpu cycles also slows down the gfx engine and in some cases produces jerky mouse movement. What is quite interesting on dosbox though is the advanced mame scaler...

I bow to your immense knowledge about how EMS support can be added to VDMSound, nTT. I also bow to your knowledge about how VDMSound interacts with NTVDM and the underlying OS and the hardware, and how an emulator like DOSBox differs from running programs and application with a normal OS.

I better go back and remiscence about my 1 MHz, 8-bit 6502 CPU and 12 KB of RAM on my first home computer....

Hello,
I read the topics about this problem, I have it too.
My problem is that if I use a dos 7.1 boot disk and I put in the config.sys the switch 'm9' in the emm386 line (so it can use as page frame E000 or something similar) ems is loaded, otherwise it doesn't load it.
(to run msdos 7.1 I did a FAT32 partition in my hard disk)

In Windows XP instead I can't find a way to load EMS.. I saw that there is the option to modify config.nt, but I don't know which is the corrispondent to 'm9' in the emm command line (it asks for B=xxxx, which is the number corrisponddent to m9?)

The fact that even in MSDOS it doesn't load at first make me think that the memory is used by some motherboard resource, but I wouldn't want to mess up the BIOS.. anyway why to run WinXP if I can't use USB or the video card?
I wanted to know if there is a solution to my problem, otherwise I'll have to use always my boot disk 😖

Is there a program that can locate the 16K of free memory where to set the EMS page frame? And that tells me which value to insert in the B=xxxx switch in config.nt?
Thank you

Kryss, I am not at my PC right now, so I this is going to be from memory, okay?

I used one of MS-DOS diagnostics tools (can't remember the name though - MSINFO, MSDIAG, SYSINFO.EXE) from within an XP DOS-prompt (COMMAND.EXE, not CMD.EXE), to look at the memory allocations.

Try it, or wait till I get home and can give you the correct commands to run.

Kryss, Do you have a 16-bit DOS-program named MSD.EXE (~166 KB in size)?

1C:>msd /?
2Provides detailed technical information about your computer.
3
4MSD [/I] [/F[drive:][path]filename] [/P[drive:][path]filename]
5    [/S[drive:][path][filename]]
6
7MSD [/B][/I]
8
9  /B                         Runs MSD using a black and white color scheme.
10  /I                         Bypasses initial hardware detection.
11  /F[drive:][path]filename   Requests input and writes an MSD report to the
12                             specified file.
13  /P[drive:][path]filename   Writes an MSD report to the specified file
14                             without first requesting input.
15  /S[drive:][path][filename] Writes a summary MSD report to the specified
16                             file. If no filename is specified, output is to
17                             the screen.
18
19Use MSD [/B] [/I] to examine technical information through the MSD interface.

You can run it from COMMAND.COM in Windows XP if you add the /I switch and bypasses hardware detection.

Hello,
I downloaded msd.exe and i ran it, it says that there are blocks 'possibly avaiable' between E000-EFFF, I think that this is the block I used with the m9 switch in MSDOS.
Then it says 'largest free block : 17k'.. Is it enough for the page frame?

I repeated msd in MSDOS with the boot disk, and the page frame is allocated exactly in E000-EFFF.
Anyway I don't know how to tell WinXP to set there the page frame.
I tried various values for B=xxxx in config.nt, but if I write B=E000 it says that there's an error in EMM line.. strangely it accepts values like B=1fff or 1eee(without setting the page frame anyway)

I attached the msd.exe log I had.
Thank you

did you try the ems driver of freedos ?
I think it's a bit better than the usual MS-crap

The old command for setting frame was
device=c:\windows\emm386.exe RAM FRAME=E000

You can also add to the end of the command i=b000-b7ff which allocates the mono display mode memory space.

I used to have 631K of base memory free using this command in DOS 6.22!

Kryss, I think I tried all that when I tried to get my nForce2 board and WinXP to agree on EMS. Didn't work, except when I disabled some of the on-board controllers. I finally came to the conclusion, that I could live with no Ethernet when playing EMS-games.

Thank you, I've tried al the possibilities, disabling all that wasn't necessary, but I didn't find a way. I'll look again for Ethernet device inthe BIOS, but I looked before and I didn't find it.. Mmm I think I'll need the boot disk but better than nothing 🙄
DosBox is great but for 3d games not so much on my pc.. someone talked about implement EMS emulation in VDMSound, as in DosBox.. that would be perfect 😉

MiniMax: Why don't you add a PCI Ethernet card to your computer?

I don't really need wired Ethernet., so why bother? My Internet connection is wireless 802.11b at the end of an USB cable so.... The fixed Ethernet is only used when my laptops needs to upload/download work units to grid.org.