I think it's stuff that expects to find the VGA framebuffer at 16MB

Hi there!

Do you know of any popular DOS game released after 1988 that has trouble with a 64MB setup?

No, not really.

However, please make sure there's enough cache memory installed.
Otherwise, the memory performance will be impaired ("cacheable area").

Also, make sure you use the Himem.sys from MS-DOS 6.x or similar! 😀
Otherwise, XMS memory will be limited to 16 MB.

Another stumbling stone might be the 15-16MB area.
It's at the end of the ISA bus (has 16MB wide address space).

That region sometimes serves a similar purpose as the UMA (640KB-1MB).
Graphics cards and other devices may use it for accesing their buffers, because developers did not expected consumers to have that much memory installed.

So in theory, parts of the memory of your 16-Bit VGA (linear framebuffer etc) could overlap with your system memory.

If that's the case, just enable the "memory hole" option of your CMOS Setup.

Good luck! 🙂🤞

Edit: BitWrangler was quicker! 😃

The full version of Death Rally won't install if you have 64MB or more (detects negative memory). I remember having to remove memory to install it. There is a patch available though.

Early versions of Duke Nukem 3D Plutonium PAK had the same bug.

That's interesting! Thanks for the information.

If negative numbers appear, maybe the INT15 parameter of Himem.sys could also be used to reduce XMS memory?
It's just a wild guess, though. If it uses DOS4GW etc. it likely would not work. 🙁

Have a nice mem test with checkit with 64MB... It stops at 16MB and locks up or reboots the computer there.

Pinball Fantasies, as it is currently on GoG, uses a custom DOS extender that can't deal with EMM386 loaded (i.e. VCPI) and more than around 48MB installed. Jazz Jackrabit, as it is currently on GoG is based on the Borland Turbo Pascal 7 16-bit DOS extender, and also breaks with 64MB RAM.