Sorry FalconFly.  This is merely a test.  I don't know if the sigs on this board support HTML.  It says it supports YABB code but I can't find anything about that in the help system.  And the preview function doesn't support sigs.

200 characters is too few for my purposes anyway really.

And there's really no need to post to test, is there?  Since all my previous posts change when I update my profile (unlike certain other message board systems) all I have to do is go and look at one of them.  Sorry for the wasted space! 

Thanks for that, FalconFly.  I obviously didn't look for the YABB tag help in the right place  .  Just want to boast about my DOS set up in my sig, like always. 

hehe, no, your Sig if perfectly fine

FastVid?

The last time I heard of this one was in conjunction with speeding up Pentium Pro CPU's with Games... ?

After that, I ignored this Utility, since I never had a Pentium Pro...

Whould this be something useful for other CPU's/Purposes as well ?

Anyway, looks like an addition to the Download Pages

PS.
With my Hand optimizations using standard config.sys and msdos.sys tweaks, I get 639k free lower RAM, and >100k upper remaining.
(All my Systems boot into a clean MS-DOS 7.0 (Win95) or 7.1 (Win98/SE), none is allowed to boot Windows ... It's actually a mix of all DOS Commands from old Versions (V4.0, 5.0, 6.0, 6.22) that still worked )

That's without Mouse and CD-ROM Driver though; don't know how much those would take off the lower mem

Greetings
FalconFly

FalconFly asked:
Quote:

It doubles my GeForce2's framerate in VESA mode DOS games on my P3.  I couldn't find anything about it working on a P3 anywhere but tests here show that it does.  It may just be because I've got an Intel motherboard (they're famously conservative with BIOS settings) and that, on other systems the tweaks that FastVid applies are already enabled though!  You could try it and test with VSPeed to see if you get any benefit.

Quote:

  That's amazing!  Is that using DOS's himem.sys and emm386.exe?  I don't see how your system ends up just using 1K of conventional memory.  Although I could break into the lower 630s if only my motherboard didn't have a 2K Extended BIOS Data Area that it won't let memory managers move (and I've actually got QEMM, 386MAX, Netroom and Memory Commander installed here (how sad is that?  ).

nudgegoonies said:
Quote:

Yes, I've found that QEMM's "stealth" doesn't work reliably here.  Indeed many of the special features of these older memory managers seem to have depended upon old hardware configurations.  They usually work well enough as replacements for emm386 but the more esoteric features are often buggy and unreliable.

Are there any programs that use DOS extenders that actually need more than 32MB (let alone 64MB)?  I have to admit that if I'm running a "modern" game that uses a DOS extender I tend to just use UMBPCI.SYS and let the extender do the actual memory management.

I don't know anything about the limitations of DOS4GW.  I've been using it for years and have searched for information about it on occasion.  There's precious little out there for such a widely used piece of code.  It seems strange really.  Every other game I play must use DOS4GW but then I do play a lot of older games here!

Anyway it's nice to know that my sig doesn't baffle everyone.  I started using it in response to those who list their system components and overclocks.  My system is too slow to compete with that stuff so, as a kind of a joke, I put this stuff up.  I mean now we overclock.  Ten years ago we tweaked config.sys and autoexec.bat files.  And now, like I say, it's also a bit of a dig at Windows XP. 

Okay, I wasn't very precise about those 639k, it's a quite little less of course
(I should have written 639000 Bytes, and wasn't thinking in kilo's )

Here are my standard mem and mem /c printouts :

mem
Speichertyp      Gesamt  =   Belegt +   Frei
---------------      ---------         --------   --------
Konventionell      640K            18K       622K
Oberer                182K            34K       149K
Reserviert              0K              0K         0K
XMS-Speicher   260,922K       502K   260,420K
----------------  --------   --------   --------
Speicher gesamt   261,744K       553K   261,191K

Ges. unter 1 MB       822K        51K       771K

Max. Groesse fuer ausfuehrbares Programm       622K (637,264 Bytes)
Groesster freier oberer Speicherblock        129K (132,400 Bytes)
MS-DOS ist resident im hohen Speicherbereich (HMA).

mem /c

Module mit Zugriff auf Arbeitsspeicher unter 1 MB:

 Name           Gesamt      =  Konventioneller  + oberer Speicher
 --------  ----------------   ----------------   ----------------
 SYSTEM      34,096   (33K)      9,616    (9K)     24,480   (24K)
 HIMEM        1,120    (1K)      1,120    (1K)          0    (0K)
 EMM386       4,032    (4K)      4,032    (4K)          0    (0K)
 DBLBUFF      2,976    (3K)      2,976    (3K)          0    (0K)
 COMMAND      7,168    (7K)          0    (0K)      7,168    (7K)
 IFSHLP       2,864    (3K)          0    (0K)      2,864    (3K)
 Frei       789,392  (771K)    637,280  (622K)    152,112  (149K)

Speicherbelegung im Ueberblick:

 Speichertyp          Gesamt   =    Belegt   +    Frei
 ----------------  -----------   -----------   -----------
 Konventionell         655,360        18,080       637,280
 Oberer                  186,624        34,512       152,112
 Reserviert                  0             0             0
 XMS-Speicher      267,183,872       513,792   266,670,080
 ----------------  -----------   -----------   -----------
 Speicher gesamt   268,025,856       566,384   267,459,472

 Ges. unter 1 MB       841,984        52,592       789,392

 Max. Groesse fuer ausfuehrbares Programm         637,264   (622K)
 Groesster freier oberer Speicherblock          132,400   (129K)
 MS-DOS ist resident im hohen Speicherbereich (HMA).

---

Now that's using FILES=70 and STACKS=32,512 , which is quite excessive (but required for some of my Batch Progams).

Using only standard STACKS=16,128 setting, I get this :

Speichertyp        Gesamt  =   Belegt +   Frei
----------------  --------   --------   --------
Konventionell         640K        18K       622K
Oberer                182K        20K       163K
Reserviert              0K         0K         0K
XMS-Speicher      260,922K       502K   260,420K
----------------  --------   --------   --------
Speicher gesamt   261,744K       539K   261,205K

Ges. unter 1 MB       822K        37K       785K

Max. Groesse fuer ausfuehrbares Programm       622K (637,264 Bytes)
Groesster freier oberer Speicherblock        143K (146,864 Bytes)  
MS-DOS ist resident im hohen Speicherbereich (HMA).

---

So in the end, only some above 637k, meaning >637000 Bytes, which was around the figure I had in memory

I know there are some more Includes for the EMM386.exe, but I think they were (sometimes) problematic, which is why I abandoned them back in the past.
Some of it will work, however, so I'm sure I could reach 639000 Bytes if needed, although only fragmented memory, and not in one piece as desired...

PS.
Formatting of the .txt Files went to shit though, so sorry for the presentation

Greetings
FalconFly

AFAIK no DOS game (written for the PC itself) ever actually needed more than 610K.  But this extra conventional memory thing becomes a whole game in itself.

Interesting to see that the author of UMBPCI has added some other older memory managers/utilities as downloads.  I've never heard of some of them but have to give them all a go! 

If we discount Memory Commander (with a theoretical 715K of free low memory on this system - over 800K without anything loaded) because it uses the trick of extending conventional memory up over the video region (QEMM's VIDRAM performs a similar trick), because you can't run games like this, then QEMM wins any contest here.

My EMS setups with all the guff loaded give me this
QEMM                        629K
386MAX                612K
Netroom                621K
EMM386                607K

Netroom doesn't do badly because I use the "cloaked" mouse and MSCDEX drivers.  The 386MAX setup may improve with further tweaking.  But QEMM just does it with hardly any input from me.  It was further developed than the others though.

Frankly I have to admit that I mainly use UMBPCI so long as the game doesn't need expanded memory though.  And nudgegoonies is right in that QEMM gives 64MB of XMS whereas the others only give 32MB.  I would think this means that the limitation comes from the memory manager rather than from DOS4GW ???.  I had hopes for Netroom since its documentation says you can specify any amount of installed physical memory up to 256MB (an unheard of amount when it was written) but, if I specify more, it locks up on loading with a "divide by zero" error. 

As you may have gathered, I love this stuff and could go on and on for hours... 

nudgegoonies said:
Quote:

Now, now!  You make it sound almost as bad as Windows

But you're absolutely right.  The amount of time I've spent tweaking DOS is out of all proportion (by a factor of several millions) to any benefit I've gained from it in terms of programs running better, etc.  The tweaking has become an end in itself!  It has no practical value whatsoever.  I do it just for fun.