First post, by NHVintage
... I've been beating my head on the wall on this and I guess I'm just not smart enough to understand without a bit of help. I did search elsewhere here for something that would fit my situation, so I apologize if I missed it (I feel like I can't be the only person who had these questions....)
First off: can anyone recommend a book or webpage or post that reviews how PC XT memory works with expanded memory or such? Seems dumb to ask but maybe it would help me figure this out:
I have a Epson Equity 1+, when it boots it shows 640kb RAM, the max for this class of 8088 machine. I have MS DOS 5.0. I have a shortage of slots so I can't buy a hardware memory expansion solution, so I tried MEMSIM32, which I set to /2048 to create the biggest possible 'swap file'. it appears to be working fine, say the messages on boot (64kb page frame is in low memory). But it seems like the machine doesn't try to use it as MEM shows the same available RAM as before.
My config.sys doesn't have FILES or BUFFERS in it. It does have DOS=UMB. trying DOS=HIGH just says there's no HM for DOS to go to. I tried DOSMAX and it says 'not enough high memory for dosmax', but later is gives output showing it has moved FILES, FCBS, BUFFERS, LASTRIV, STACKS, and INSTALL to a series of memory addresses from 1E0A to 20AE. I've tried QRAM 1.0 but it gives the awesome error of "There is nothing useful to do." 😁 CONFIG.SYS has the programs in this order: MEMSIM32, DOSMAX, DOS=UMB, and lastly QRAM.
Can someone suggest what I may be doing wrong? Should I try a different order? Another memory management program? I'd just like a bit more memory to run some VGZ files that the machine is just short of memory to run. I seem to recall there is a program that could leverage video memory - I have a Trident TVG8900 EVGA card with the maximum amount of memory on it, I believe thats 1MB, maybe that would help?
Thanks!