Uncreative Labs

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 264 Location: Ohio/USA

I have a 286/16 with 4mb of ram, what is the best memory manager for this setup? I have too many drivers eating up my 640k RAM.

I was going to optimize with DOS 6.22 and then I remembered this is a 286 and emm386 won't work.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I can't recall how to get all of your UMBs and UPPER memory back on a 286 running MS or PC DOS. I think I've seen a few non-shareware utilities that can do it. But, I think the best way to go about it is to install Caldera DR-DOS. DR-DOS has great memory management for 286s with it's own EMM286 program.

I use a make-it-486 SLC chip on my 286 just for the 386 memory management.

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 20

There's not much you can do on a 286 to free up low DOS RAM because you can't emulate EMS in hardware (a 386 can, but you're not running a 386). The best you can do is to use a DOS version that supports loading itself and its buffers "high" using the A20 line to eek out an extra 64KB RAM. DOS 6.22 with himem.sys can do this, but I second the opinion that DRDOS/Caldera was able to load much more stuff into that 64KB segment (parts of its code, buffers, it's own ansi.sys, etc.) so give DRDOS a try.

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 264 Location: Ohio/USA

Any specific version of DRDOS?

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

As far as I know, the latest versions are always the best ones. I think I was running version 7.x. It's been a while since I used DR-DOS, but I remember being able to do some really neat multi-tasking stuff on my 286 with it.

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

there was a "sort of emm286

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 264 Location: Ohio/USA

EMM286 was in DRDOS?

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

Yes, I believe that's what they called it.

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 20

I believe EMM286 is in FreeDOS as well. But I wouldn't use it, since it's a hack (no actual page frame; it just copies data around, just like XMS). It's good to load if you have a program that will not run without EMS, but if you just want to run a disk cache or ramdrive, use something that supports XMS instead, since there's slightly less overhead (and the program can optimize transfers any way it wants to, rather than being limited to a 64K frame divided up into 4K pages).

Joined: 22 Apr 2007 Posts: 264 Location: Ohio/USA

I did get an archive for QRAM but my chipset was not supported. I installed DrDOS 7.03 (free download) but havn'r done anything with it yet.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

What version of QRAM are you running? I recently found a copy of V2.02 on a german FTP.