ant@batserver.cs.uq.oz (Anthony Murdoch) (11/28/89)
I have an AT clone with 2Meg of memory, 640K standard and the rest extended. I am currently looking at the Above EMS simulator to use 1M of my extended memory as EMS. My primary use for this would be with Windows 2.11. Has anyone out there had any success with this combination ? How exactly does MS Windows use EMS anyhow ? Other programs seem to be able to use the simulated EMS ok (PCtools for example), but all I get from windows is windows with 70K less real memory than it normally has. What am I doing wrong ? Is there some flag I should be setting to tell windows, "Hey it's there, use the stuff !!" ? Please assist me in this. thanx in advance ant | \o/ Anthony Murdoch ant@batserver.cs.uq.oz | -O- ant Dept of Computer Science "It's great to be young and insane" | /0\ University of Queensland - Dream Team
gerry@na.excelan.com (Gerry Reynolds) (11/29/89)
In article <2268@moondance.cs.uq.oz> ant@batserver.cs.uq.oz writes: >I have an AT clone with 2Meg of memory, 640K standard and the rest extended. >I am currently looking at the Above EMS simulator to use 1M of my extended >memory as EMS. My primary use for this would be with Windows 2.11. We use Quarterdeck's expanded memory manager for 386's and that works fine with Windows/286. I assume Quarterdeck has a version that runs on 286 machines. I've seen some expanded memory emulators that work with Windows and some that don't. > >Has anyone out there had any success with this combination ? How exactly >does MS Windows use EMS anyhow ? Other programs seem to be able to use the >simulated EMS ok (PCtools for example), but all I get from windows is >windows with 70K less real memory than it normally has. Windows/286 and Windows/386 use expanded memory in the same manner and that is to bank switch different windows applications in and out of the first megabyte of memory. Whenever you load a windows application a "fresh bank" of EMS page frames are banked in and the application is loaded into those page frames. If you click back to the previous application then windows will switch to that applications bank. It's useful for running multiple windows applications at the same time but each application must be able to "run" in the standard 640K environment (Slightly more because some of the memory above 640K can be used). Basically what EMS buys you is the ability to load MULTIPLE applications and NOT larger applications. An article by Paul Yao in the January 1988 issue of MicroSoft Systems Journal describes it much better. -- UUCP: {ames,sun,apple,mtxinu,cae780,sco}!excelan!gerry Gerry Reynolds BARRNet: gerry@excelan.com --
poffen@chomolungma (Russ Poffenberger) (12/01/89)
In article <2268@moondance.cs.uq.oz> ant@batserver.cs.uq.oz writes: >I have an AT clone with 2Meg of memory, 640K standard and the rest extended. >I am currently looking at the Above EMS simulator to use 1M of my extended >memory as EMS. My primary use for this would be with Windows 2.11. > >Has anyone out there had any success with this combination ? How exactly >does MS Windows use EMS anyhow ? Other programs seem to be able to use the >simulated EMS ok (PCtools for example), but all I get from windows is >windows with 70K less real memory than it normally has. > >What am I doing wrong ? Is there some flag I should be setting to tell >windows, "Hey it's there, use the stuff !!" ? Please assist me in this. > I think windows wants EMS memory that conforms to LIM 4.0. I too once tried an EMS simulator and it didn't work well. I since bought an intel AboveBoard (Real EMS memory) and it works quite well with MS Windows. Also, if you install himem.sys (in your config.sys file), windows can use the first 64k of extended memory as conventional (a quirk in the 80286 chip). Once you have EMS with windows, most windows applications reside mostly in this EMS memory leaving conventional memory alone (almost, they still require some conventional memory). I can get all of the windows supplied applications up at the same time and still have conventional memory left. Russ Poffenberger DOMAIN: poffen@sj.ate.slb.com Schlumberger Technologies UUCP: {uunet,decwrl,amdahl}!sjsca4!poffen 1601 Technology Drive CIS: 72401,276 San Jose, Ca. 95110 (408)437-5254 ------------------------- In a dictatorship, people suffer without complaining. In a democracy, people complain without suffering.
ant@batserver.cs.uq.oz (Anthony Murdock) (12/07/89)
gerry@na.excelan.com (Gerry Reynolds) writes: >Windows/286 and Windows/386 use expanded memory in the same manner and >that is to bank switch different windows applications in and out of the >first megabyte of memory. Whenever you load a windows application a >"fresh bank" of EMS page frames are banked in and the application is loaded >into those page frames. If you click back to the previous application then >windows will switch to that applications bank. It's useful for running >multiple windows applications at the same time but each application must >be able to "run" in the standard 640K environment (Slightly more because >some of the memory above 640K can be used). Basically what EMS buys >you is the ability to load MULTIPLE applications and NOT larger applications. >An article by Paul Yao in the January 1988 issue of MicroSoft Systems >Journal describes it much better. I tried a little experiment with windows and the "Above Disk" EMS simulator. The experiment was to see how many applications I could run in each of the following three situations ; 1> Without the simulator installed, 2> The simulator using 1.3Meg of extended as EMS, and 3> The simulator using 4Meg of my hard disk as EMS. The simulator takes up about 70K of main memory. I was disappointed to find that I was unable to load as many things into memory in situation 2 as I could in situation 1. In situation 3 however I could load almost as much as I could in situation 1, much more than in situation 2. Does this mean that I have to have something like 8 Meg of EMS before I start seeing some benifit ? Gerry's comments seem to say that EMS is actually useful in ms-windows, but my results seem to say only if you get a huge amount of it. Am I doing something wrong ? Please post a reply (don't email as I am moving soon) so I can work out what is happening. thanx in advance ant