vu0112@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu (Cliff Joslyn) (01/28/89)
I am talking to the LanTana corporation, which recently bought out Teleware West. They sell a product called Turbo-EMS (was: RAM-Lord) which I would like to use to throw my TSRs into EMS. Any comments our experience? -- O----------------------------------------------------------------------> | Cliff Joslyn, Cybernetician at Large | Systems Science, SUNY Binghamton, vu0112@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu V All the world is biscuit shaped. . .
swh@hpsmtc1.HP.COM (Steve Harrold) (01/31/89)
Re: Turbo EMS from Lantana I've been using this product sporadically, whenever I get into a crunch with conventional memory (<640K). And it indeed does all that my applications ask of it with regard to being an ersatz EMS driver. It has several nice features: 1) You can tell it to use disk, RAM disk, or extended memory as its backing store 2) You can tell it how to cohabit extended memory with other programs that also want to use extended memory directly (e.g. VDISK, disk cachers, and spoolers) 3) You can activate it at any time and remove it from memory at any time without rebooting; thus you don't have to continuously pay for the conventional memory it does consume during an active state. One drawback, not mentioned in the literature, is the fact that it DOES consume conventional memory: 64K for the window buffer plus about 16K for its own code. There is no way to avoid the 16K, but the 64K space is NOT consumed by real EMS memory boards; these devices use the same amount of space but above the 640K line, in the area reserved for video buffers and such. This is not the fault of the Turbo EMS package but the down side of a simple fact of physics that mere software cannot manufacture RAM space above 640K. Note that the drivers supplied with real EMS boards also consume space in the conventional memory region. To use Turbo EMS, you have to tell your application that EMS is present for it to use (some packages do it automatically when they detect an EMMXXX driver). Nevertheless, because of the 80K-byte penalty, your application has to be able to operate in a conventional memory region which has been reduced by this amount. On the practical side, both Codeview and Turbo Debugger work with Turbo EMS. It is my impression that TD initializes must faster than CV for the same large program. This is true when using extended memory as backing store, and especially true when using hard disk. In fact CV seems to thrash expanded memory so much that using a hard disk as EMS for CV is just not practical. -- --------------------- Steve Harrold ...hplabs!hpsmtc1!swh HPG200/13 (408) 447-5580 ---------------------