rschmidt@copper.ucs.indiana.edu (Roy Schmidt) (12/11/90)
It seems that there are two device drivers in my MSDOS 4.01 package that are not documented. I had not given much thought to these two because I had only 1 MB of RAM, but recently I installed a wee bit more (4 MB). Now, I happily sat down and decided to use this new RAM by using the nifty device drivers MS included. I placed both in my config.sys file as the first two entries, figuring EMM386 would activate the LIM 4.0 memory board, and HIMEM would do something about DOS hogging up 130K of conventional memory. I was right on both counts, but somewhat dismayed that I didn't get all I expected. EMM386 only activated 640K of LIM 4.0 Expanded Memory. It also gave me a message saying that fact. I examined this with PCTOOLS and found that over 3 MB of Extended Memory was there and *not* accessible. Further, PCTOOLS thumbed its nose at the 640K of Expanded Memory and didn't use any of it to store its overlays as advertised. HIMEM grabbed 64K of RAM from limbo land (between 640 and 1024) and stored part of DOS and all the other device drivers (mouse, ansi, etc.) up there. They all function just fine, and DOS is trimmed to 73K (still a little fat, but I can wait for 5.0). Now, so much for jabbering -- just wanted everyone to understand that the things work, and I basically know what I am doing. My problem is that I don't have any documentation for these two drivers. I went thru the manuals every which way and they are not there! Is anyone familiar with these two drivers? Are there switches to control such things as how much Expanded Memory gets turned on (EMM386) or how much limbo room is stuffed with DOS? Thanks to anyone with docs or other esoteric knowledge... -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Roy Schmidt | #include <disclaimer.h> Indiana University | /* They are _my_ thoughts, and you can't Graduate School of Business | have them, so there! */
hd7x@vax5.cit.cornell.edu (Sanjay Aiyagari) (12/11/90)
In article <77533@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>, rschmidt@copper.ucs.indiana.edu (Roy Schmidt) writes: > It seems that there are two device drivers in my MSDOS 4.01 package that > are not documented. I had not given much thought to these two because [... deleted ...] > EMM386 only activated 640K of LIM 4.0 Expanded Memory. It also gave me > a message saying that fact. I examined this with PCTOOLS and found that > over 3 MB of Extended Memory was there and *not* accessible. Further, > PCTOOLS thumbed its nose at the 640K of Expanded Memory and didn't use > any of it to store its overlays as advertised. > > HIMEM grabbed 64K of RAM from limbo land (between 640 and 1024) and > stored part of DOS and all the other device drivers (mouse, ansi, etc.) > up there. They all function just fine, and DOS is trimmed to 73K (still > a little fat, but I can wait for 5.0). > > Now, so much for jabbering -- just wanted everyone to understand that > the things work, and I basically know what I am doing. My problem is > that I don't have any documentation for these two drivers. I went thru > the manuals every which way and they are not there! Is anyone familiar > with these two drivers? Are there switches to control such things as > how much Expanded Memory gets turned on (EMM386) or how much limbo room > is stuffed with DOS? The documentation for these two drivers is in Appendix D of the Microsoft Windows 3.0 manual. EMM386 needs a parameter to indicate how much EMS to use. It doesn't automatically convert all extended to expanded the way QEMM does. To solve this problem, simply use the line: device=emm386.sys 3072 And you'll have 3 MB EMS. There is also a frame= parameter to specify the location of the EMS page frame, but it usually is not necessary. As for HIMEM.SYS, there isn't much to it other than the device=himem.sys. The only interesting parameter is the /shadow:off parameter to disable shadow RAM, but since you have 4 MB I don't think you'd want to do that. Sanjay Aiyagari (hd7x@vax5.cit.cornell.edu)
kshaffer@modcomp.uucp (Ken Shaffer) (12/12/90)
In <77533@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> rschmidt@copper.ucs.indiana.edu (Roy Schmidt) writes: >It seems that there are two device drivers in my MSDOS 4.01 package that >are not documented. I had not given much thought to these two because >I had only 1 MB of RAM, but recently I installed a wee bit more (4 MB). >... [misc stuff deleted] >the things work, and I basically know what I am doing. My problem is >that I don't have any documentation for these two drivers. I went thru >the manuals every which way and they are not there! Is anyone familiar >with these two drivers? Are there switches to control such things as >how much Expanded Memory gets turned on (EMM386) or how much limbo room >is stuffed with DOS? >Thanks to anyone with docs or other esoteric knowledge... > These drivers were documented on some readme file on the distribution diskettes. I do not have these disks here to give you the exact name, but I would look at any text files you can find. Ken Shaffer modcomp!kshaffer