You can always load up a random TSR repeatedly until the desired amount of conventional memory is consumed. I think you can even get away simply with running COMMAND.COM repeatedly, though I'm sure there's a more elegant tool floating around out there.

Jorpho wrote:

You can always load up a random TSR repeatedly until the desired amount of conventional memory is consumed. I think you can even get away simply with running COMMAND.COM repeatedly, though I'm sure there's a more elegant tool floating around out there.

But subsequently booting an image (as the OP states) would obviously render all that null and void.

Errius: just use PCem - it lets you easily configure the total amount of RAM installed. DOSBox won't work for this I'm afraid... I think there was a patch which added this functionality to the Daum build, but IIRC it didn't really work as expected.

Gotcha, Pcem it is then.

Also what version of LOADFIX are you guys using? The one I have doesn't accept any switches.

I got the same result from multiple calls of an old program called LOSE64K which literally consists of just two lines:

MOV DX,FFFF
INT 27

DOSBox's internal LOADFIX can be told how many KBs you want it to eat up- e.g. "loadfix -256" to allocate 256K (mind the "-", won't work without it). There's also "-f" to free it up again.

Oh cool I had an actual LOADFIX.COM program in C:\DOS that must have been hijacking the call