VOGONS


First post, by rca06d

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I got the mechwarrior 2 line of games running in dosbox, but I frequently get a "Memory running low" message and crashes from all of the games. I've set my 'memsize' var in the dosbox.conf to 1024, but it doesn't seem to help, as I'm still getting the message and crashes when dosbox is using under 200 MB according to task manager. I'm running windows 10, and i've had to set my 'output' in dosbox.conf to either overlay or openglnb. The other settings seem to render nothing at all to the screen. Anything I can do to give the games more memory to work with?

Reply 1 of 8, by leileilol

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rca06d wrote:

to 1024

There's your problem.

Try a real, realistic value, like 16

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Reply 2 of 8, by rca06d

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I set that value after having issues at the default value. And I guess I don't understand how the memory setting works. The game is using about 150 MB according to task manager, won't setting it to 16 be way too low?

Reply 3 of 8, by gdjacobs

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Please read about the difference between RAM and persistent disk storage.

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Reply 4 of 8, by rca06d

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As a side note, can I just say its really annoying that the word 'memory' is ignored by the search on this forum. How is that word considered 'too common'? /rant

Reply 5 of 8, by rca06d

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Thats unhelpful @gdjacobs. I know what the difference between RAM and disk storage is. On planet earth, the word 'memory' usually refers to RAM. There is no indication in the dosbox.conf that 'memory' actually refers to disk storage, are you saying that is the case with the 'memsize' variable?

Reply 6 of 8, by gdjacobs

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It doesn't refer to disk storage. Disk storage is determined by the inderlying, which in the case of DOSBox is the mounted folder or image. It's not set by the conf file.

I'm sorry for being snippy, but this seemed pretty straightforward from the beginning. The config file for DOSBox has good inline documentation. Even if you weren't sure about exact terminology, reasoning out the meaning wouldn't be difficult.

memsize: Amount of memory DOSBox has in megabytes.

This is not the amount of money allocated to DOSBox the program, but the amount of memory DOSBox makes available to DOS executables as conventional, high, XMS, EMS, etc. If memsize is 16, it's like having an old DOS PC with 16 MB of memory installed.

Most systems throughout the DOS era couldn't even physically address 1024 MB of RAM. 64 MB of RAM was a luxury until the second half of the 90s and 32 MB was generally the practical limit for DOS 6.22.

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Reply 7 of 8, by rca06d

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Ok yeah, I'm seeing some other posts talking about a 64 MB max. Its unfortunate if that is really the case, because my game seems to need a little more 🙁. Well, if anyone knows a way to lift THIS limit, please let me know. I kinda thought dosbox could at least do 32-bit, but sounds like not? I know 32-bit systems can address up to 4 gigs of memory, and I thought 16-bit could only do like 64 kilobytes. Dosbox is somewhere in between? I obviously don't know much about the architecture.

Reply 8 of 8, by gdjacobs

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Mech 2 and GBL run great with 16 MB of RAM or more on real hardware. Task Manager tells nothing about the usage of DOS memory in your simulated machine when using DOSBox.

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