As far as I recall QEMM was way better than MS EMM386

I used QEMM as well and was quite happy with it.

digitaldoofus wrote:

the performance of my 386 Win 3.1/DOS 5.0 vintage PC...

Why exactly are you using DOS 5.0 instead of 6.22 ?

Anyway, I reckon the utility of QEMM depends on exactly what you want to use your machine for. Back in the day I remember a lot of READMEs cautioning about compatibility problems, at least with QEMM in "stealth" mode.

MDGX.com has a lot of useful stuff on memory configuration; try http://www.mdgx.com/mem6.htm .

Jorpho wrote:

digitaldoofus wrote:

the performance of my 386 Win 3.1/DOS 5.0 vintage PC...

Why exactly are you using DOS 5.0 instead of 6.22 ?

The PC came factory pre-installed with Win3.1 and DOS 5.0, and I thought that for running my games there wasn't much benefit to using a later DOS. What benefits do you feel justify moving to DOS 6.22? MEMMAKER?

PS: By the way...MDGX.com is a great website...thanks for the link! 😀

My take on the alternative memory managers is that they were really most useful when you had a lot of device drivers and other memory resident programs and needed to really eek out as much conventional RAM as you could for an app. People with SCSI hardware come to mind, too, because of the extra drivers.

I never had that kind of hardware load so EMM386 got the job done for me. Also, the protected mode games of the Late DOS Era(TM) were typically less demanding of conventional memory.

I did try out Qualita's 386Max though, but it really wasn't necessary. 386Max was a lot cheaper than QEMM.

These programs were also more useful for people who didn't want to dig into the boot files themselves and tweak things. I was really into that stuff and found it "fun", honestly.

swaaye wrote:

My take on the alternative memory managers is that they were really most useful when you had a lot of device drivers and other memory resident programs and needed to really eek out as much conventional RAM as you could for an app. People with SCSI hardware come to mind, too, because of the extra drivers.

I never had that kind of hardware load so EMM386 got the job done for me.

I did try out Qualita's 386Max though, but it really wasn't necessary. 386Max was a lot cheaper than QEMM.

On one of my 286 systems, I tried out both NetRoom3 (supposedly one of the really good early memory maximization programs) and I believe an early version of QEMM but it seemed that they were incompatible for some reason (perhaps a conflict with my expanded memory card, maybe).

Never had much luck running qemm with any of the dos 7.x versions for windows. Still have qemm running on the 368 with win 3.11 and it works great there. All the other machines have dos 7 and i mostly use jemm from freedos for them especially since it has support for running device drivers in 32bit memory without it taking up any low memory.

If I recall correctly, QEMM allowed me to run Ultima VII: Serpent Isle while EMM386 did not. I could be wrong, though. It was like, you know, years ago, when I was still running DOS 6.2 on Pentium 100.

I'm using QEMM. I run it as a default configuration in my 486. Older games are EMS friendly, and it's OPTIMIZE program (the equivalent of MEMMAKER) usually squeezes out a minimum of free 632kb of conventional memory from any number of nasty TSR programs I throw at it (at the cost of video card's page frame address - but so far I have not seen any problem with the games I have).

I still use EMM386 and MEMMAKER in another boot block in my config.sys, just in case a program requiring ems conflicts with QEMM and it's method of providing memory (and also for nostalgic sake 😁).

If I recall correctly, QEMM allowed me to run Ultima VII: Serpent Isle while EMM386 did not. I could be wrong, though. It was like, you know, years ago, when I was still running DOS 6.2 on Pentium 100.

No wonder, since U7 was not compatible with emm386 at all 😀
It needed himem and if you really wanted to load all kinds of drivers you needed umbpci (I still have my u7 autoexec.bat and config.sys around).

Harekiet wrote:

Never had much luck running qemm with any of the dos 7.x versions for windows. Still have qemm running on the 368 with win 3.11 and it works great there. All the other machines have dos 7 and i mostly use jemm from freedos for them especially since it has support for running device drivers in 32bit memory without it taking up any low memory.

Which version of QEMM are you successfully running with your Win3.11 system? QEMM386? Or one of the later versions of QEMM?

I liked Qualitas 386MAX 7.01 better than QEMM. I was really into memory management back in the DOS days and compared them quite a bit. My friends squeezed out maybe 2-3K more conventional memory with QEMM, but their rigs were much more unstable. Of course, review magazines back then were no different than today. They saw that QEMM gave you more memory and that was that. QEMM was the best. Stability, usability and living with it never made the reviews.

Nowadays I can get everything I need in upper memory with either basic DOS 6.22 memory management or UMBPCI.SYS, which is free. 386MAX is still good but not as necessary because I no longer need two very big memory hogs like in the 90's - Stacker/Superstore and SCSI drivers.

Ok, maybe not quite a 386, but... have tried QEMM on win98, heh 😊

PC Tools version 9, by Central Point

I use QEMM386 9.0 for alot of the old rigs. UMBPCI requires a compatible PCI-chipset and thats no option on boards without PCI.
From my experience QEMM is more compatible with certain other programs as the Ultrasounds MegaEM in DOS 7. (it doesn't work with EMM386).
On the other hand using of QEMM requires a bit more knowledge of memory layouts or you will create your own problems. From my experience the optimize program works much more professional than memmaker.
As for the ROM-Stealthing feature - a rather good approach is to let optimize do a thorough analysis and takeover these options. If you just go and enable Stealth by hand you are on the best way to make your system unstable. Stealth is only required if you don't have enough UMBs. Since gaming configurations are not demanding, it is usually not required. In the old days on the other hand, you would try to load Stacker, Ansi, Doskey, Keyboard, Smartdrv, ISDN-Capi, cFos and CD-ROM in a SCSI System.... (did I forgot something?)
Today no one considers the special support for Stacker, Drvspace, Dblspace, MagnaRam for Win3.x, DesqView and a number of other programs useful anymore.
The memory problem nowadays appear to be Graphics cards with huge BIOS-ROMs that eat up your UMBs. If chipset supports Stealthing might be an option.

A quite comfortable option of QEMM is the Quickboot Feature. Reboot without going through the BIOS again. This saved/saves so much lifetime.

eL_PuSHeR wrote on 2010-09-12, 19:24:

As far as I recall QEMM was way better than MS EMM386

What does Qemm did beter, what EMM386 cant?

Talk about nacro bump. I've got QEMM386 on one of my hdds because DesqviewX doesn't want to run without it..

Robin4 wrote on 2021-01-02, 01:05:

eL_PuSHeR wrote on 2010-09-12, 19:24:

As far as I recall QEMM was way better than MS EMM386

What does Qemm did beter, what EMM386 cant?

QEMM 7 or higher supports Enhanced V86 - you know, that feature that Ryzen totally messed up.. 😉
Enhanced V86 aka VME can trap interrupts and so on an was introduced with the 586 or late 486es.
http://www.rcollins.org/ddj/Jan98/Jan98.html

Anyway, neither QEMM nor EMM386 are exactly ideal for 386 PCs.
Because, they are slowed down by V86 mode.
486 or 486DLCs may or may not be affected by this performance "issue". Speaking under correction, though.

On a 386, a dedicated UMB or EMS board might be an alternative. CPU performance wise, at least.
Memory bandwidth of ISA is slower than the SIMM slot memory bandwith of a 386 chipset.

Also, QEMM seems to have issues with certain Cyrix systems.
My Media GX based system was highly unstable with QEMM 7.
With EMM386 of MS-DOS 6.2x, it ran okay, though.

Personally, I think that QEMM is neat for Virtual Machines.
Because they run better in V86 (there's no separate Real-Mode emulation needed).
And because VMs often lack emulation of UMB or EMS features.
Alternatively, UMBPCI can also be used, which uses PCI shadow memory, so no V86 headaches occur.

Robin4 wrote on 2021-01-02, 01:05:

eL_PuSHeR wrote on 2010-09-12, 19:24:

As far as I recall QEMM was way better than MS EMM386

What does Qemm did beter, what EMM386 cant?

Yeah I know, huge bump. But seriously, I have no idea why that pisses so many people off for no reason whatsoever.

In my experience, QEMM is miraculously fantastic at being able to load pretty much everything into upper memory like no other competing product, and made it work for the most inexperienced of users. It was truly miraculous in this regard.

The problem was, once you got it there, you had every right to expect that it was going to work. In my experience, there wasn't a single DOS configuration that QEMM produced that proved to be stable. QEMM is the most crash-happy memory manager of all time, and though it's always so tempting to use it, once you start gaming with it, you'll be crashing repeatedly. DOS gaming crashes QEMM (or vice versa) with disgusting reliability. QEMM is the most exciting, miraculous, badly-needed, feature-packed, amazingly functional, brilliantly marketed DOS game crasher in computing history.

But you don't have to take my word for it. Head over to WinWorldPC.com, download a copy of it from the library, and load it up. Experience the joy and excitement of what it feels like to have all that memory freed up in ways that MemMaker couldn't even get close to, and then experience the heartache of it all being totally worthless. Tragically, that's really what QEMM brought to DOS.

Sadly, Qualitas's 386MAX (a more simplistic QEMM if you will) also suffers stability issues for DOS gaming, so I didn't get any relief there either.

The absolute most stable configurations I have ever been able to pull out of DOS has been 100% pure memmaker/Microsoft. The memory hasn't always been the hightest, but stable as a rock.

For this reason, I use a boot manager (System Commander v8) on my retro DOS boxes. I have boot configs for pretty much everything, and love to play around with QEMM and 386MAX, as I do love the capabilities of these memory managers. But they're highly poisonous to DOS gaming. All the boot configs for any DOS gaming I set up are created with memmaker only, and I avoid all headaches by doing so. I so badly wish QEMM was up to the task, but that's never been the case.

To throw QEMM a bone, however, there is one use that QEMM truly does shine brightly, and that's when it's paired with DesqView. That's a fantastic combination that's very exciting to actually put to use.

Highwinder wrote on 2022-01-27, 21:23:

In my experience, there wasn't a single DOS configuration that QEMM produced that proved to be stable. QEMM is the most crash-happy memory manager of all time, and though it's always so tempting to use it, once you start gaming with it, you'll be crashing repeatedly. DOS gaming crashes QEMM (or vice versa) with disgusting reliability. QEMM is the most exciting, miraculous, badly-needed, feature-packed, amazingly functional, brilliantly marketed DOS game crasher in computing history.

Well that's your opinion/experience. My experience is quitte different. I used it back in the day and I am still using it on one of my retro pc's. No problems running games or at least no more then running under plain MS DOS. Please give some examples of problem games so I can give it a try. Always like to tinker with those kind of problems. 😀