Oh. So Might and Magic III is the second game who needs 768k on Tandy 1000 computers after Wing Commander.

Interesting.

While another title that specifically lists a 768K requirement is Dynamix' 16-color version of Willy Beamish, far more games require a system to have the the 128K video memory expansion simply given the lack of conventional memory available otherwise.

I mentioned M&M3 because its issue is different than the MCB issue that affects Railroad Tycoon on the Tandy machine type, and so far I have found no other game in the same situation. For example, MicroProse's Lightspeed and Hyperspeed worked on the Tandy machine type with 608K available in 0.74, and are now crashing in SVN with 624K available, but they work with 624K available if MCBs are coalesced. Although the 624K available provides more conventional memory, it requires that programs be mindful of the fact that not all of the video memory area is "reserved".

Because LOADFIX allocations can't create the same effect, I made a small program to reduce the BIOS and DOS available memory by 16K for those games that worked in 0.74 with 608K available but are not working with 624K available in SVN. It may also help M&M3 on real Tandy systems with only 640K installed.

This program did not help me, I think the game complained about having too little DOS memory, but the error message was too quick to read before I got booted back to a DOS prompt. I think it did not help that I was running MS-DOS 6.22, which consumes 60KB of conventional memory without anything else loaded. The program left me with 548KB, which I would think is not enough to run MM3.

Oh well, real Tandy systems would have been a bonus, but of course the program was designed for DOSBox. M&M3 does not appear to be conflicting with the graphics memory area, so reserving that memory doesn't really target its issue. In conflicts with the graphics memory, DOSBox will typically hang in an endless loop when the MCB chain is destroyed, requiring external termination, so that specific problem can be easily recognized.

I have come to the conclusion that DOSBox's memory management with the Tandy machine type is superior to any real Tandy 1000 with Tandy video. DOSBox SVN provides an impressive 616KB to the Tandy machine type and 632KB to the other machine types (with the exception of the pcjr). With mouse driver and CD-ROM support, can DOSBox really take up only 18KB of conventional memory? I believe that DOSBox is using the High Memory Area for its extra 64KB to load much of its DOS kernel, drivers and command line interpreter.

That puts it better than real hardware. No Tandy 1000 with Tandy video, not even ones with a 286, could support HMA. These systems only have 8-bit slots and thus have no place to access the A20 line. None can be upgraded beyond 640KB or 736KB, and the last 128KB of the latter is used strictly for video. So a memory upgrade to add an HMA area would require a great deal of modding.

DOSBox does not enable the HMA by default, only software like HIMEM.SYS or the like will do that. DOSBox has RAM in the C800-CFFF segment range (occupied by HD controller BIOS and others on real systems) that is used as the "DOS private area" for tables and other data, leaving more conventional memory available. Because the memory is writable, misbehaving software can wipe out the data there and cause issues, e.g. Colony Wars 2492.