I doubt it, because you'd have to somehow initialize the ramdrive and keep it there before Windows actually booted all the way, which means you have to do it from DOS, which means you're going to probably have weird issues with it in Windows itself.
I can't name anything in specific that wouldn't work though. I dunno give it a try.

Go into Windows 98, run msconfig. Under general hit advanced then go down to limit memory to whatever value you want (512mb). Open your PC up and add the amount of ram you want. My guess it should work just fine. I have never tried this so I'm just theorizing. If Windows 98 gives you any trouble with memory issues after you install the ram just go into safe mode and do the process over again.

@Trank, ill try that, I think that's the same issue as entering the maxfilecache.

But I found this: http://www.uwe-sieber.de/files/xmsdsk.zip

XMS/EMS RAMdisk v1.9i […]
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XMS/EMS RAMdisk v1.9i

16-bit DOS TSR [74 KB, freeware] or XMS/EMS RAMdisk v1.9i with installer/uninstaller for Windows 9x/ME [114 KB, freeware]

Improved Microsoft RAMDRIVE.SYS replacement for MS-DOS 5/6 and Windows 9x/ME/3.1x loads and resizes the RAM drive (up to 2 GB) from AUTOEXEC.BAT or native MS-DOS prompt.

Does NOT shift drive letters.

Includes two separate drivers: XMSDSK.EXE (loads in extended RAM: requires an upper/extended memory manager in CONFIG.SYS) and EMSDSK.EXE (loads in expanded RAM: requires EMM386.EXE with the "RAM" switch, or any other 3rd party expanded memory manager in CONFIG.SYS).

Uses 688 Bytes of upper DOS RAM if loaded with LOADHIGH in AUTOEXEC.BAT (upper memory manager required in CONFIG.SYS).

Thats cool, if my method is completely null it seems like that file you found could be your solution.

Your tip is working, at least I testet it on a virtual machine. Added up to 1 gig of ram and set the max on 128, and i got 128.

Now when I add a ram drive into autoexec.bat, now i have 8 meg, it will leave 120 over. It's just testing now. Didn't worked in config.sys

But now every time I boot i got a message if I want to run that. Is there a way to just autorun the autoexec.bat?

You noticed, long time ago I used 98... oohhhh 😊

here a picture, but this tells nothing about stability.

Wow... Im glad my "theory" or guess worked. This is cool cause i have always wanted to test that. Though like you said who knows how the stability is. It could work perfectly.

This is a really cool idea! Thanks for sharing. I think I might try this on the next Win9x build, whenever that ends up being.

So, in trying to bypass the Win98 RAM barrier myself, I have come across many solutions. One common one, as already mentioned, is to create a RAM drive at startup. What I ended up doing with my 2GB Athlon64 build is limiting RAM at startup using HIMEMX, and double-tapping that with setting MaxPhysPage to 512MB. Works fine for me.

SRQ wrote:

I doubt it, because you'd have to somehow initialize the ramdrive and keep it there before Windows actually booted all the way, which means you have to do it from DOS, which means you're going to probably have weird issues with it in Windows itself.

Not at all. You can add the relevant settings in CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT, and Windows will be just fine with it.

Could you place the page file/virtual memory stuff in the ramdisk and thus effectively get more memory?

keenmaster486 wrote:

Could you place the page file/virtual memory stuff in the ramdisk and thus effectively get more memory?

I was just thinking the same thing. It wouldn't be more memory of course it would just be a really really fast page file. It will still copy data from the page file to memory and back again which wouldn't be as fast as having that much memory natively, but would be interesting to see how it would work.

If anybody is interested, you can still download the older v3.5.130 RC 24 version of DataRAM's RAMDisk software here:

http://filehippo.com/download_ramdisk/tech/12441/

Change Log for the newer v4.x releases is here, in case you're wondering what you get with the newer versions:

http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-servic … amdisk-releases

Also, it looks like v4.4.0 RC 33 was the final version that supported 4gb RAM drives in the freeware version:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150728124454/ht … ftware/ramdisk/

You can also still get v4.4.0 RC 33 here:

http://filehippo.com/download_ramdisk/tech/60398/

v4.3.0 RC 1 is the final version that works with XP. You can get it here:

http://filehippo.com/download_ramdisk/tech/16080/

Rhuwyn wrote:

keenmaster486 wrote:

Could you place the page file/virtual memory stuff in the ramdisk and thus effectively get more memory?

I was just thinking the same thing. It wouldn't be more memory of course it would just be a really really fast page file. It will still copy data from the page file to memory and back again which wouldn't be as fast as having that much memory natively, but would be interesting to see how it would work.

Yes, I've read about people doing this sort of thing before. To be clear, it is self-defeating to store a swap file on a RAM disk from RAM that Windows would already be able to use.

I guess if you're using a computer that can already use more than 512 MB of RAM, then it's probably fast enough that it makes little difference to store the page file in RAM instead of the hard drive, especially since it's not easy to use that much RAM in Win9x in the first place.

I think whit 512Mb of ram, you won't need a Swap file, so you could set it to Zero or maybe 16mb.

What I did now is redirect the Temp files to the ram drive. This, first is faster than the harddisk (duh) and less fragmenting it. And everything is cleared up after a reboot.

this I have in my autoexec.bat

1xmsdsk [harddisksize in kb] [Driveletter] /y /t
2md r:\temp
3set tmp=r:\temp
4set temp=r:\temp

/y don't ask questions while starting
/t use the most up end memory block available.

Till now, after one day, works fine.