Originally posted by RJL I gave the exact instructions to two other people (running WinXP) and both are claiming that they are getting DOS errors concerning either no XMS or EMS memory found. I can't remember enough of DOS to try to fix this. I seem to remember an "EMM386.exe" that might need to be running and/or defined, but...

Any suggestions? What makes this perplexing is that this runs great on my computer, but immediately crashes on theirs.

This is entirely dependent on their hardware. Odds are, their motherboard is using upper memory area for hardware that prevents EMS from being created. This is becoming more and more common....

showthread.php?threadid=2172&highlight=EMS+MEM

We have been getting more and more reports about this behaviour. It wiould be a good idea trying to guess what upper memory areas are being used by the motherboard. Have anyone tried the FRAME statement to re-allocate EMS page frame address. Common page frame addresses are E000 and CB00. I have also seen somebody putting the address at B000 which is the vga address for monochrome modes and are rarely used in colour displays.
Another thing. Is there a way to change frame address in VDMSound and/or DOSBox? It would be a nice feature. I remember to have seen an old AMSTRAD machine that had video bios at E000:0000 instead of the common C000-C7FF.

I'd be surprised if anyone was actually successful at putting it at B000, as I believe there is only half the amount of memory there that is required for an EMS page frame. There are old DOS utilities that will let you see detailed RAM info for the first megabyte - those might help you find a free 64KB hole between 640K and 1MB to use for a page frame.

Someone needs to write an EMS driver that can use either DPMI or some other Windows memory interface to do everything instead of using simulated DOS hooks provided by Windows, as those are obviously unreliable.