Hello,
I am hoping for some help from folks on the board here. I am old enough to have used/played games on an 80486 but young enough to have never built one (I had one as a kid). I decided to put one together and picked up a bunch of parts from a local guy with A LOT of old stuff in his basement. To keep the story reasonably short I got the following from him:

-256kB L2 Cache via 8x 256kb SRAM chips + 1 256kb chip in the TAG slot (these are all 20ns chips, but made by two different manufacturers)
-1x UC4913 Rev 2.0 motherboard which as I understand was made by ECS.
-1x Intel 80486 DX2-66 CPU
-8x 30-pin SIMM modules, 4MB each, for a total of 32MB RAM (all modules are identical)
-1x 16-bit ISA multi I/O card of an unknown brand (it shows P/N EP2C100M-2 with a hand-written serial number below)
-1x Trident 8900CL 16-Bit ISA VGA card with 1MB of RAM (it was basically new in the box with all drivers/manuals etc)
-1x SB16 16-Bit ISA CT2830 board

This motherboard uses an external battery, and so there was no battery damage on it, and the board appeared to be in new condition. I replaced the battery with a 3.6V Lithium Thionyl Chloride one and connected it to the board.

For disks I am using a IDE-CF adapter with a 4GB CF card and a GoTek floppy emulator with the HXC third-party firmware on it. I put all this together and it boots just fine, CMOS settings are also properly saved with the new battery. I installed MS-DOS 6.22 from floppies (via the emulator) and one of the first things I did was do a "mem /c".

MS-DOS reported zero upper memory inuse or available (HIMEM.SYS is being loaded and the memory test passes), it also showed some "reserved" memory. I disabled "memory remapping" in the BIOS and the "reserved" value went away, but upper memory available remains at zero.

I fiddled for a while in the BIOS and I was unable to find any way to make any upper memory available to DOS on this system. Does anyone have any ideas? With no upper memory i'm going to have a lot of trouble running many games and i'll have to constantly (even more then was normal for DOS) fiddle with the loaded drivers to try to get enough conventional memory. I just can't believe that there is no way to gain access to the UMA on this board?

SOLVED - I ran memmaker and after it modified my config.sys I suddenly had 158k of high memory. It must have been something with respect to the content of the config.sys. It is now as follows:

DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS /TESTMEM:OFF
DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE NOEMS
BUFFERS=30,0
FILES=30
DOS=UMB
LASTDRIVE=H
FCBS=4,0
DOS=HIGH

I will of course tweak this in the future as needed, but I'm relieved that it's not a limitation of the hardware!