drs@bnl.UUCP (04/20/84)
Has anyone had any strange experiences when the memory in a PC was increased? Today I installed a Tecmar Captain board which expanded the amount of RAM to the maximum 640K permitted on the XT. DOS boots up correctly, but a program which has been running well for ages now almost immediately crashes with a "Stack Overflow" message, and attempts to recompile a small Pascal program with the IBM pascal compiler aborts with a "Compiler out of memory" error message! <insert the sound of teeth grinding> To make matters worse, I can make the first problem vanish by running the program from DEBUG, or by setting the swithes on the board to show < 512K total memory. It may also eliminate the seconde. I don't suspect the Tecmar hardware since a friend of mine installed one with the same result. The Venix operating system seems to be unaffected. Any help would be appreciated. I'll post the solution since anyone running unix on this machine needs all the memory they can get! Dave Stampf Applied Math. Dept. Brookhaven Natl. Lab. Upton, N.Y. 11973 (516 282 4148)
jph@whuxle.UUCP (04/21/84)
#R:bnl:-42300:whuxle:22700025:000:103 whuxle!jph Apr 21 09:10:00 1984 The problem is that the startup routine for PASCAL 'bombs' if there is more than 512K of memory. There
todd@islenet.UUCP (04/22/84)
This is not a solution to the >512K RAM problem, but it will (I hope)
give a credible reason for the problem of certain programs claiming
that the PC is "out of memory" when more than 512K is installed. If
you look at the DIP switch settings for specifying installed RAM size,
you will notice that the first four switch settings for 64K and 576K
are identical. Ditto for the settings for 128K and 640K. The fifth
switch is the determining factor here. If the program you use only
"looks at" the first four switch settings to check RAM size, it will
"think" that only 64K or 128K is there (for 576K and 640K respectively).
While patching the program is the optimum solution, this is often not
possible. In this case, you may simply want to reset your RAM size
selector to 512K and hope that your RAMdisk and RAMspooling programs
are able to recognize the memory above it anyway (AST software can
do this).
Todd Ogasawara -- University of Hawaii -- Dept. of Psychology
{ dual,vortex,uhpgvax }!islenet!toddjph@whuxle.UUCP (04/28/84)
#R:bnl:-42300:whuxle:22700026:000:539 whuxle!jph Apr 21 09:23:00 1984 The problem is that the startup routine for PASCAL has a bad instruction that can not test if memory is greater than 512K. To get around it, use the following patches for PAS1, PAS2, and PASCAL.LIB. ren pas1.exe pas1.xyz debug pas1.xyz e 72a 76 ; original value should be 7E w q ren pas1.xyz pas1.exe ren pas2.exe pas2.xyz debug pas2.xyz e 112a 76 ; original value should be 7E w q ren pas2.xyz pas2.exe debug pascal.lib e 5ba 76 ; original value should be 7E w q At this point it should work fine with >512K of memory.