We did special boot disks to strip out everything but what was needed for the game, but sometimes we still couldn’t make it
One day I went to a friends house and he had like way more conventional memory in memtest! What the hell I spent hours and days getting 620kb
I'd done so well optimizing my conventional memory with my rig (a 486SX w/ 4, then later 16 MB of RAM), then I purchased a Media Vision Pro/ Audio Spectrum 16 card and screwed it all up.
The silly thing purported SoundBlaster compatibility but needed a TSR that, if memory serves, couldn't be loaded into upper memory for that "compatibility" to actually work. It was maddening, but I'd already spent the money. Then there was the matter of throwing away more memory for the drive for the card's onboard SCSI controller... Grr...
I had a 286 with 1MB of RAM. It had a chips and technologies chipset that used that RAM to shadow the ROM BIOS but you could also have it put memory anywhere in the upper memory area that was free. So I too religiously optimized conventional/upper memory because that was all the memory that I had.
Good times. Our DOS game PaybackTime 2 was only capable of using conventional memory. That was a major reason for the game really not having any proper animations for its player characters.
I have to admit, DOS memory management is very fascinating to me as a very amateur kernel investigator. I have a book called “DOS beyond 640k” which describes all sorts of extensions people back in the 80s invented to get as much free memory as possible. The contents of course are irrelevant nowadays, but it is still interesting to read as a tech book.
Mmmm, flashbacks of complex sets of AUTOEXEC.BAT & CONFIG.SYS files that we'd swap in and out using batch files to support different memory configurations...
I set up a computer for an engineering department. It was an IBM PS/2. They wanted to run AutoCAD and Ventura Publisher, one used extended memory and the other expanded.
I ended up making batch files that swapped around autoexec.bat and config.sys files so they could run.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 37.6 ms ] threadHe was running Dr -dos
I'd done so well optimizing my conventional memory with my rig (a 486SX w/ 4, then later 16 MB of RAM), then I purchased a Media Vision Pro/ Audio Spectrum 16 card and screwed it all up.
The silly thing purported SoundBlaster compatibility but needed a TSR that, if memory serves, couldn't be loaded into upper memory for that "compatibility" to actually work. It was maddening, but I'd already spent the money. Then there was the matter of throwing away more memory for the drive for the card's onboard SCSI controller... Grr...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Protected_Mode_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Control_Program_Interf...
I remember toying with DPMI in assembler.
If you remember seeing how, you'll get a free virtual cookie.
I ended up making batch files that swapped around autoexec.bat and config.sys files so they could run.