You can't add any more onboard memory so you will have to use a card. You can either use EMS, in which a larger block of memory on the card is bank-switched in and out of a portion of the address space (such as D000 or E000) such as a Lo-Tech EMS card, or instead get a card that doesn't support EMS and instead places fixed blocks of memory within that upper address space, such as having 64K at D000 and 64K at E000 for a total of 128K additional memory. The Lo Tech 1MB RAM card is such a card, with dip switches to enable/disable memory at different addresses. That memory would then be usable as upper memory blocks for your TSRs on MS-DOS 5.0+, and available for utilities like DOSMAX to move DOS into, freeing portions of conventional memory similar to how DOS=HIGH,UMB and DEVICE=EMM386.EXE NOEMS work on a newer system.

Are you using any software that actually supports EMS? I doubt it, unless you have a retro reason to use something like Lotus 1-2-3 or real mode Windows. So I would go with the latter type of card that provides some UMBs. But even then, is this just motivated by curiosity or are you actually out of conventional memory for something you want to run?

jakethompson1 wrote on 2022-09-28, 19:23:

You can't add any more onboard memory so you will have to use a card. You can either use EMS, in which a larger block of memory on the card is bank-switched in and out of a portion of the address space (such as D000 or E000) such as a Lo-Tech EMS card, or instead get a card that doesn't support EMS and instead places fixed blocks of memory within that upper address space, such as having 64K at D000 and 64K at E000 for a total of 128K additional memory. The Lo Tech 1MB RAM card is such a card, with dip switches to enable/disable memory at different addresses. That memory would then be usable as upper memory blocks for your TSRs on MS-DOS 5.0+, and available for utilities like DOSMAX to move DOS into, freeing portions of conventional memory similar to how DOS=HIGH,UMB and DEVICE=EMM386.EXE NOEMS work on a newer system.

Are you using any software that actually supports EMS? I doubt it, unless you have a retro reason to use something like Lotus 1-2-3 or real mode Windows. So I would go with the latter type of card that provides some UMBs. But even then, is this just motivated by curiosity or are you actually out of conventional memory for something you want to run?

Thank you very much. I do like my spreadsheets. Like most things classic computer, It generally ends up being about the games. I figured I'd throw an ad-lib card clone in here. I was thinking about the low-tech cards. They didn't make one with both compact flash and additional memory?