Yeah, that is true - on an 8mb card that's a lot of DIP chips...

Orchid RamQuest 8/16 supports up to 32 MB, and can be used in an XT.
But it's hard to find...

The only easily available EMS card seems to be the Lo-tech EMS 2MB.

Impressive! One of them or four Everex and the complete 32MB capacity of LIM4 EMS is being utilized! 😃

Yeah.. The Lo-Techs seem to be the only ones here, as well as Pico based universal boards.
Both seem to be LTEMM based, so we have a mixture of LIM4 EMS Manager and EMS 3.2 boards (LIM4/EEMS had more optional features, like backfilling or a larger-than 64KB page frame).

PS: Central Point's PC-Tools 7 had some Norton Commander style file manager, too, I think.

Jo22 wrote on 2025-03-13, 03:41:

PS: Central Point's PC-Tools 7 had some Norton Commander style file manager, too, I think.

It has PCShell, but it's *NOT* NC-style.

More like DOS Shell, or Windows File Manager:

Unacceptable for me.

for quick stuff I always use LIST by the late V. Buerg
ofcourse it is not a 2-panel file manager but for quick viewing/copying/deleting/extracting I cannot think anything better
on slower machines I use DOS NAVIGATOR and on faster one Necromancer's DOS NAVIGATOR

Some things to consider...

Some machines don't like norton-commander or volkov-commader, some software has also issues when started with either of both.
It could be related to mouse-support to, so with a wrong mousedriver you can also get into trouble.

very early versions of NC rely on dos-executables (NC 3 and before). I also like VC because it never relied on dos-executables, but it has a bigger memory footprint and that has also to be considered for games/software that requires a lot of free dos-memory (<640KB). On my MCA IBM PS/2 Model 56 486SLC2 I use the beta of vc that makes use of XMS and has a small footprint on dos-memory-consumption.

I always favorize the two file-windows, things like PC-Shell or Dosshell are not very handy for filemanagement if you want to copy/move stuff around.

There are situations when it's better to avoid commanders...

Commanders occupy some memory even when running a command - if a program refuses to run because of not enough memory, just quit the commander and try again.

I also avoid loading TSRs from a commander - it's a good idea to load all the necessary TSRs first, and *then* run the commander.

The general idea of Norton Commander, however, is BRILLIANT!

There's so many operations with TWO arguments - source and destination...
copy, move, compare, convert, create archive, extract archive...
It's so natural to have TWO panels for such operations!

And at the same time - the CLI is always at hand!

The next anniversary of Norton Commander will be next year, by the way. 🥳
Here's a thread from 10 years ago: Norton Commander Anniversary

keropi wrote on 2025-03-13, 10:47:

on slower machines I use DOS NAVIGATOR and on faster one Necromancer's DOS NAVIGATOR

I haven't tried the original DN on my Pentium 233 MMX, but Necromancer's DN works painfully slow for me… to the point of being unusable. Is it normal?

Azarien wrote on 2025-03-13, 18:52:

keropi wrote on 2025-03-13, 10:47:

on slower machines I use DOS NAVIGATOR and on faster one Necromancer's DOS NAVIGATOR

I haven't tried the original DN on my Pentium 233 MMX, but Necromancer's DN works painfully slow for me… to the point of being unusable. Is it normal?

it should fly on 233mmx, I am using a fairly old 2010 version - v2.31.5309
perhaps newer versions are not optimized for old hardware? the site seems to be gone as well, the latest archived version is from 15-Oct-2024 , I wonder what happened...
I am attaching the version I am using here, remember this needs a FPU to work

dn1.5.1 is best imo, later ones (ndn) are overbloated and slow.

keropi wrote on 2025-03-13, 19:20:

it should fly on 233mmx, I am using a fairly old 2010 version - v2.31.5309 perhaps newer versions are not optimized for old har […]
Show full quote

Azarien wrote on 2025-03-13, 18:52:

keropi wrote on 2025-03-13, 10:47:

on slower machines I use DOS NAVIGATOR and on faster one Necromancer's DOS NAVIGATOR

I haven't tried the original DN on my Pentium 233 MMX, but Necromancer's DN works painfully slow for me… to the point of being unusable. Is it normal?

it should fly on 233mmx, I am using a fairly old 2010 version - v2.31.5309
perhaps newer versions are not optimized for old hardware? the site seems to be gone as well, the latest archived version is from 15-Oct-2024 , I wonder what happened...
I am attaching the version I am using here, remember this needs a FPU to work

someone posted on /r/dos the domain was for sale.

i temporarily hosted the latest dos version

http://bloodycactus.com/files/ndn.zip its 3.00.0012 from majorgeeks (which is randomly up and down and inconsistent)

@jo22:

Unfortunately that card is listed as unstable on modern XT clones like mine. I have one of JD's (monotech) NuXT and a Micro8088 I built. Check the Known Issues section. I do wonder if it's a power issue and if that'd be solved by some pull-ups and lower voltage SMT IC's. Really unsure.

I've stumbled on this previously. Makes me really sad as I'd love one (!). Yeah.. more is better. 4mb would be ideal.. 2mb is squishy with some of the apps I'm messing with and one I'm writing that needs a lot more memory (It's been a journey) so I have (multi-)config.sys to load things up when I'm testing larger data and separate configs for the times I want to use mTCP .. or Turbo C or Galaxy .. or 1-2-3 (which can really gobble memory).

^Sorry to hear. 🙁 As a temporarily solution, you can try to run an EMS simulator which can use swap file, such as Above Disc.
It's slow, but it might be okay for non-gaming/non-music applications.
A compiler or CAD program, for example, might be okay with it.

My favourite has always been Pc-Tools Deluxe 4.3.

Pros:
1. Very small - The whole suite comes in a 5.25" 360kb floppy disk. The executable to start the main program is about 170kb.

2. File maintenance and directory maintenance in one.

3. Additional in-built tools within the main program like sorting files for DOS, text editor, hex editing, hard disk parking, file mapping, etc.

4. The suite comes with external commands for format, backup, restore, mirror imaging and a file defragmentation tool called COMPRESS.

5. Eye pleasing default color scheme. (This may be subjective)

Cons :
1. Can't recognize hard drives larger than 512MB.
2. May produce errors or may not run in faster and newer systems (some late 486s and above)
3. Single window management only.

I used this a lot, like really a lot, when I had my 286. It's my go-to software from managing files to text editing.

The next version from Central Point after Deluxe 4.3 was Deluxe 5. It was a big jump and it has the look of the other "commanders". Not sure if Central Point started the whole commander look & function thing...

I still use it in 86Box (my favourite PC emulator) in my 286 and 386 "machines".

Malik wrote on 2025-03-23, 18:53:

The next version from Central Point after Deluxe 4.3 was Deluxe 5. It was a big jump and it has the look of the other "commanders". Not sure if Central Point started the whole commander look & function thing...

But it doesn't look like commanders!

By "commanders", I understand something like Norton Commander - two panels, to be used as source and destination.

That PCShell from PC Tools might have been an inspiration for DOS Shell, and various GUI file managers.
Commanders, however, are completely different!
Also, Norton Commander 1.0 came in 1986 - long before PC Tools 5.x, 1989.