1. add "HIGHSCAN I=B000-B7FF" after the "RAM" parameter of EMM386
2. remove all "DOS=" lines and just add "DOS=HIGH,UMB" once
3. remove SMARTDRV.EXE
4. use CuteMouse instead of that MOUSE.EXE
This should give you about 50-60 kb more conventional memory.
Also, remove all that "/L:x,y" stuff. I guess you did run memmaker at some point?
1. add "HIGHSCAN I=B000-B7FF" after the "RAM" parameter of EMM386
2. remove all "DOS=" lines and just add "DOS=HIGH,UMB" once
3. remove SMARTDRV.EXE
4. use CuteMouse instead of that MOUSE.EXE
This should give you about 50-60 kb more conventional memory.
Also, remove all that "/L:x,y" stuff. I guess you did run memmaker at some point?
Yes, I ran memmaker.
CuteMouse couldn't find my mouse, so I commented out the lines for both mouse programs and the game still won't load.
Last edited by Lylat1an on 2020-03-15, 23:52. Edited 1 time in total.
Is there a way to load DOS games into high memory?
Yes, if you mean the range of 640KB to 1MB (aka adapter space, adapter's segment, Upper Memory Area/UMA).
Problem is, the term for that region varried. Both in time and space (country).
Originally, in English countries, that space was called "high memory". This was in the mid-1980s or so,
when people tried to make their old PCs make use of more system memory for DOS (conventional memory rather than UMBs).
At the time, with Hercules and CGA cards, it was possible to have 704 to 736KB (and beyond with other gfx hardware) of ordinary DOS memory,
provided the motherboard was configured that way..
Later, after XMS came out and Himem.sys was able to use 64KiB (-16bytes) above 1024KB -on ATs- to swap out DOS kernal,
it became "upper memory" (with free memory blocks called UMBs; Upper Memory Blocks).
In German speaking countries, for example, this was not adapted until the release of DOS 7 for several reasons.
In DOS 6.22, the Upper Memory Area (UMA) is erroneously called "Hoher Speicherbereich" (high memory location),
and the HMA (High Memory Area) is called "Oberer Speicherbereich" (upper memory location),
causing confusion with English speaking folks sometimes. Especially when they're around on English forums. 😉
"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel
Upon further investigation, the issue seems to be that the combination of the two programs are just too large to fit in conventional memory.
The game needs 560KB, SNESKey is 57KB, together they equal 617KB out of the 602KB total conventional memory available.
Is there a smaller alternative to SNESKey that will let me use a game controller to emulate a keyboard? Or a way to load SNESKey into a higher memory area?
There's no issue getting 617 KB or even more. And you can load SNESKey into high memory. But I'm not sure what you've tried so far, since you did not answer to my previous question.
Jo22wrote on 2020-03-15, 23:52:In German speaking countries, for example, this was not adapted until the release of DOS 7 for several reasons.
In DOS 6.22, the […] Show full quote
In German speaking countries, for example, this was not adapted until the release of DOS 7 for several reasons.
In DOS 6.22, the Upper Memory Area (UMA) is erroneously called "Hoher Speicherbereich" (high memory location),
and the HMA (High Memory Area) is called "Oberer Speicherbereich" (upper memory location),
causing confusion with English speaking folks sometimes. Especially when they're around on English forums. 😉
First of all, to be fair, "upper" and "higher" are basically synomyms, so it would be hard to keep any distinction between the two when trying to translate both things literally. But why didn't those silly Germans just stick to the English acronyms, like we did in the Netherlands? Why unnecessarily add so many syllables, and introduce such confusion otherwise? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There was the HMA, and there were UMBs. Simple. And the fact that the former was in singular form with a definite article and the latter was plural, made the distinction even clearer. There was only one HMA, but there could be many UMBs, depending on the motherboard's chipset.
It seems odd that your system only has 649,216 bytes of conventional memory in total. Conventional should be 655,360 bytes total, or at least that's what I get on my systems.
It might help if you could also tell us which game/program it is that you're trying to get to run in combination with that SNESKey utility.
Some games (like Catacomb 3-D, Commander Keen 4-6 and BioMenace) try to allocate additional XMS memory via UMBs and will not be able to use XMS at all as long as you have the line "DOS=UMB" or "DOS=HIGH,UMB" in your CONFIG.SYS. Allowing DOS to use UMBs means that MS-DOS will grab all available UMBs at startup, so the game can't use them. Without "DOS=UMB", however, you won't be able to load any drivers or TSRs into high memory. Unless your drivers and TSRs are filling your entire upper memory, you might get better results by letting the game use the UMBs and loading your drivers and TSRs into conventional memory.
The best solution for these games is to have either a dedicated boot disk or a boot menu with a matching entry. Remove anything that isn't absolutely necessary to get the game running (CD-ROM drivers, mouse drivers etc).
