igully wrote on 2024-12-17, 18:56:
EMSMAGIC does not run with Windows 1.x/2.x
Really? WTF is this statement supposed to mean? 🤷♂️
My apologies for my wording, but the way this (complaint ?) reads is close to a provocation.
- Because discussing optimization of Windows 98 era system first, and then arguing about missing support of obsolete toy Windows from 1986/87. That's.. odd. 😟
To me that's as if we're talking about how good MS-DOS 6.22 is for general compatibility,
but then some voice says "But it can’t run CHESS from 86-DOS 0.11! But PC-DOS 1.x can!"
I mean, sure, that might be true, but.. Oh well. 😮💨
Anyway, never mind..
But just for sake of curiosity, does EMM286 do any better or worse here? 🙎♂️
And how about Windows 3.0 in Real-Mode, if we're at it? 🙎♂️
It will fail with both EMM286 and EMSmagic, I guess?
To my understanding, Real-Mode Windows has quite some demands when it comes to Expanded Memory support.
That's just natural considering that Windows 2.x /386 has its own EMS provider built-in (sort of a cousin of EMM386).
- Whereas normal Windows 2.x ships with drivers for EEMS/LIM4 compatible expanded memory boards, such as AST Rampage or Intel Aboveboard.
Edit: And we must consider this: Windows is a multitasking or multi-program environment. Things like context-switches may happen.
EMS use must be coordinated somehow, thus. So that multiple programs can use EMS simultanously, such as Excel and PageMaker, without corrupting data.
Not sure how it does work in detail, but this might be different than providing EMS to one single EMS-aware DOS program.
EMS always had been the centre of memory support in the 1980s, in short.
Larger Windows applications needed EMS badly because they couldn't access XMS or Extended Memory.
DESQView even wanted to use that back-filling trick that required moving most RAM from system motherboard over to the EMS board, so it could act as an MMU.
IBM had an even more advanced type called "XMA", which was more like EEMS and with a huge page frame.
IBM's own EMS drivers in PC DOS 4 had compatibility issues with EMS software, such as Windows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_memory
http://annex.retroarchive.org/cdrom/orig_shar … 4WIND/DOS40.TXT
Windows 3.0 even supports two kinds of EMS, Small Frame (64KB) and Large Frame (256KB) type.
And it's EMM386 who provides the latter type, of course.
If you're running MemMaker, it will ask for Windows support.
Answering with "yes" will make Windows 2.x and 3.x see proper EMS support.
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