What drivers do have loaded?

Mouse? CD-ROM? doskey? SMARTDRV?

560K is not hard to achieve.

Hmm I really should do a video guide on this topic 😊

Extended memory can't be accessed the same as conventional, so really the only solution is to free up more conventional memory. Getting to 560K shouldn't be very hard, really you should try to get it higher than that because some games will want more.

I suggest posting a copy of the output of
mem /c
and also the contents of these files:
autoexec.bat
config.sys

This should provide all the info needed to make some specific suggestions.

Yeah you have 60k conventional unaccounted for.
That is a LOT. 600K free should be fairly easy to achieve.

What drivers and stuff are loaded at startup?

Smart drive, oak cdrom driver, mouse, sound blaster pro 2

Why is DOS only allocating 640k? I can play doom I and II fine, what are the ram requirements for guide games?

dosquest wrote:

Why is DOS only allocating 640k? I can play doom I and II fine, what are the ram requirements for guide games?

Because in real mode only 1 MB is addressable
And with memory mapped devices and the RAM usage of DOS itself 640k is the maximum that can accessed through normal means in real mode

Doom runs in protected mode so it can use all you RAM

What mouse driver are you using? I suggest you try cutemouse because it's tiny memory footprint
I don't know the memory consumption of the oak driver or SBP driver. Maybe it can be loaded high?

Should be easy to to get more than 600K free nowadays, especially with some of the newer memory drivers from freedos but good old himem and emm386 should manage it as well.
You should also make a dos boot menu where you can setup different configurations if you don't need a cdrom driver loaded or no ems/xms whatever.

How do I selectively start in protected mode? Or is it to do with dos4gw?

I'll try using dos4gw extender.

You can only run in protected mode if the software/game supports it.
Why are you so opposed to trying to minimize real mode memory usage?

Post the output of mem please

dosquest wrote:

Why is DOS only allocating 640k? I can play doom I and II fine, what are the ram requirements for guide games?

This is the way DOS games have worked forever, or at least before people started using DOS extenders as in Doom 1 and 2. It is surprising that this is the first time you have encountered this issue. Back in the day, freeing up enough of the 640k of base memory was a constant struggle; you sure as heck can't magically wave DOS4GW at everything and make the problem go away. Sometimes you can get away with running things from an MS-DOS prompt in Win9x, but usually that just brings in new, different problems. And you could, of course, just use DOSBox. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_memory .

As has been stated twice now, post the output of mem /c as well as your autoexec.bat and config.sys. You may also have a "memory hole" option enabled in your BIOS. See for example Conventional memory problem .

Sorry to leave you hanging. So I rebooted the system and miraculously it works. Evwn though there is still LESS free ram than it claims to need. Honestly don't know why its working now.

Dosquest you might find my new MS-DOS tutorials useful.

Especially the second one. It has a start-up menu and drivers ready to download:

http://www.philscomputerlab.com/ms-dos-tutorials.html

I have not run into a game that doesn't work with one of the menu options. Ultima VII works fine with menu option 3 with mouse and CD-ROM driver.

Thanks! That worked. Now I'm working on getting duse (usb) working.

Here are my config and autoexec files. Any suggestions on further optimizing and performance boosts? I think its pretty good so far.

AUTOEXEC.BAT

1SET SOUND=C:\SB16
2SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6
3C:\SB16\SB16SET /M:220 /VOC:220 /CD:220 /MIDI:220 /LINE:220 /TREBLE:0
4C:\SB16\SBCONFIG.EXE /S
5@ECHO OFF
6PROMPT $p$g
7PATH C:\DOS
8SET TEMP=C:\DOS
9LH C:\DRIVERS\CTMOUSE.EXE /R2
10GoTo %config%
11:EMCUSB
12:XMCUSB
13:CMCUSB
14:EMC
15:XMC
16:CMC
17LH C:\DOS\MSCDEX.EXE /D:OPTICAL
18:EM
19:XM
20:CM

CONFIG.SYS

1[COMMON]
2DOS=HIGH,UMB
3FILES=30
4BUFFERS=30
5LASTDRIVE=Z
6
7[menu]
8menuitem=EMCUSB, Expanded memory + Mouse + CD-ROM + USB
9menuitem=XMCUSB, Extended memory + Mouse + CD-ROM + USB
10menuitem=CMCUSB, Conventional Memory + Mouse + CD-ROM + USB
11menuitem=EMC, Expanded memory + Mouse + CD-ROM
12menuitem=XMC, Extended memory + Mouse + CD-ROM
13menuitem=CMC, Conventional Memory + Mouse + CD-ROM
14menuitem=EM, Expanded memory + Mouse
15menuitem=XM, Extended memory + Mouse
16menuitem=CM, Conventional memory + Mouse
17
18
19menudefault=EMCUSB,30
20
21[EMCUSB]
22DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS /TESTMEM:OFF
23DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE RAM
24DEVICEHIGH=C:\DRIVERS\VIDE-CDD.SYS /D:OPTICAL
25DEVICE=C:\DRIVERS\USBASPI.SYS /w /v 
26DEVICE=C:\DRIVERS\DI1000DD.SYS
27
28[XMCUSB]
29DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS /TESTMEM:OFF
30DEVICEHIGH=C:\DRIVERS\VIDE-CDD.SYS /D:OPTICAL
31DEVICE=C:\DRIVERS\USBASPI.SYS /w /v 
32DEVICE=C:\DRIVERS\DI1000DD.SYS
33
34[CMCUSB]
35DEVICEHIGH=C:\DRIVERS\VIDE-CDD.SYS /D:OPTICAL
36DEVICE=C:\DRIVERS\USBASPI.SYS /w /v 
37DEVICE=C:\DRIVERS\DI1000DD.SYS
38
39
40[EMC]
41DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS /TESTMEM:OFF
42DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE RAM
43DEVICEHIGH=C:\DRIVERS\VIDE-CDD.SYS /D:OPTICAL
44
45[XMC]
46DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS /TESTMEM:OFF
47DEVICEHIGH=C:\DRIVERS\VIDE-CDD.SYS /D:OPTICAL
48
49[CMC]
50DEVICEHIGH=C:\DRIVERS\VIDE-CDD.SYS /D:OPTICAL
51
52[EM]
53DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS /TESTMEM:OFF
54DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE RAM
55
56[XM]
57DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS /TESTMEM:OFF
58
59
60[CM]

61

Looks good 😀

Holy fast replies! 😁 Thanks for the tutorial, gonna look through your videos later. 😀 You seem to have some cool stuff.

You can save a little more by setting the LASTDRIVE a little lower.
Unless you are using all the way to Z that is.

nah, it only goes up to E (if usb is plugged in, so I will make last drive G)