First post, by tjsnhgaming
Greetings all!
I'm running MS-DOS 6.22 on real hardware.
I've been troubleshooting some sound card issues with my ISA PNP SoundBlaster Vibra16 (everything seems mostly fine, but Solar Winds 1 locks up occasionally with sound enabled, and a few of my old goldbox D&D games won't load the sound driver - but sound works fine in WFW3.11, duke3d, doom, etc etc), and as part of the troubleshooting I removed ECHO OFF from my autoexec to monitor the startup a little better.
I noticed I was getting the "out of environment space" error before it finished loading all the soundblaster stuff. Did some troubleshooting, re-arranged things in autoexec, etc - I still got the "out of environment space" but could control *where* in the boot process I got it. As it stands now, I get it right at the end when trying to set the PATH .... everything *seems* to work, and PATH seems set correctly, but I don't like having an error message hanging around on boot ...
So, with some google-fu I found advice to put "SHELL=command.com /e:1024" in my config.sys to manually increase the environment size.
Done. "out of environment space" error goes away.
However ... when using SHELL=command.com /e:1024 , my path doesn't get set ... and I'm not sure why ...
I still haven't resolved the underlying sound driver stuff, but I'm pretty confident if the path isn't being set a good number of other things aren't going to work (WFW3.11 has .. issues .. when I boot with SHELL=command.com /e:1024 without the path properly set , etc etc )
Anyone have any good info on why my path isn't being set if SHELL=command.com /e:1024 is in config.sys?
Am I going about this troubleshooting from entirely the wrong direction?
autoexec.bat
PROMPT $p$g
SET TEMP=C:\DOS
C:\WINDOWS\net start
SET SOUND=c:\drivers\vibra16
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6
REM SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P300 T6
SET MIDI=SYNTH:1 MAP:E
SET CTCM=c:\drivers\vibra16
c:\drivers\vibra16\DIAGNOSE /S /W=C:\WINDOWS
c:\drivers\vibra16\MIXERSET /P /Q
c:\drivers\vibra16\CTCU.EXE /S /W=C:\WINDOWS
C:\DOS\SMARTDRV.EXE /X
LH C:\WINDOWS\MSCDEX.EXE /S /D:OPTICAL
set mouse=C:\PROGRAMS\MOUSE
C:\PROGRAMS\MOUSE\mouse.exe /Q
PATH C:\WINDOWS;C:\PROGRAMS\MOUSE;C:\DOS;C:\PROGRAMS;C:\GAMES
config.sys
SHELL=command.com /e:1024
SWITCHES=/F
DOS=HIGH,UMB
FILES=40
LASTDRIVE=Z
STACKS=9,256
DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS /TESTMEM:OFF
DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE RAM
DEVICE=c:\drivers\vibra16\CTCM.EXE
DEVICEHIGH=C:\DOS\SETVER.EXE
DEVICEHIGH=C:\DRIVERS\VIDECDD.SYS /D:OPTICAL
DEVICEHIGH=C:\WINDOWS\IFSHLP.SYS