98SE

Remember those old phone modems? You put your phone into it before the serial modems. 150 Baud speed. The jump from 2400 Baud to 14.4K was tremendous then. Without Netscape I think we would still be bumbling around on Lynx in pure text. Netscape Navigator was one of the earlier saviors... Then the beast at Microsoft emerged and bundled Internet Explorer which later became Internet Infector. I remember opening certain websites that only liked to use IE. Then the battle began. AOL buys Netscape and AIM was the biggest thing since Apple Pie. I still favor it over Facebook/Twitter. Compact and efficient and who doesn't love the Buddy List. The salvation of IE 4.0 was Quick Launch... There couldn't have been a better feature from Windows to the user interface since then. I miss its native functionality removed from Windows 7 and later. You can kind of recreate it but it's still not the same with the Clear Desktop Icon moved and I can't seem to put the Recycle Bin icon on using the Pin to Taskbar feature.

Not for a main system. As a test system I don't care. This might be good for Mac OS X and Linux mixing but I wouldn't do it for my DOS and Windows MultiBoot. Which specific "features" are missing in ALL other boot managers that make you use it? Can you put this on a floppy disk to boot and if your boot drive got corrupted what's the recourse in restoring just the boot manager portion without overwriting the entire partition?

LOL yeah those series of 9s seem a bit consistent. One off key...? SATA AHCI BSOD 7B error most likely.

Back when AOL was "the thing" for dial up. You could use Trumpet Winsock and Mosiac to access websites which were few if any. I think this was on an old 486 that barely could handle it. One of the earliest maybe even very popular website was The Spot. I guess you could call it a reality TV show in the form of a website before reality TV shows became popular like today. There wasn't a whole lot of websites to visit on the internet then compared to today. BBSs were still more popular than the internet at the time and this was before DSL or Cable modem. Maybe 14.4Kb for BBSs then 33.6Kb for most internet users and rare to get the 56Kb V90 sonar tone unless you had a real good land line connection to the ISP. Unfortunately there is no real equivalent form of a BBS on the internet. No more ANSI art. BBSs were special and being a SysOp was rewarding when someone connected to your computer usually one user per phone line it was like welcoming a guest into your house. I guess you could say the SysOp is also the ultimate host and lurker too.

I was looking for a link to whatever Ramdisk program he was talking about. But I see this company was responsible for Memmaker for DOS which I used but it certainly wasn't as good as QEMM for MM.

Where did you find the incept date for MSFN? I had to do a hard advanced search for forum date first entry. I figured the 9X would be one of the earliest forums guess it was close. I had to telnet to a University server and borrow a student's account since I wasn't a student there but years later I did become one and used Unix commands to access primitive internet. Gopher, Pine, Lynx, Ytalk, and UseNet were some of the old gotos. The good thing was it was similar to DOS so it was a natural acclimation going from one CLI to another. Ever heard of The Spot? Since you are from Brazil was a BBS a big thing down there? Ever heard of FidoNet?

No I was not buying something from you then because I was a MSFN user. I created the MSFN account at the time looking for Windows 2000 tips to install on a Z77 at the time since there were not any SATA AHCI drivers and it seemed to be a dead end and never bothered to use the forums much again except an occasional drop in to see if any Windows 2000 progress happened. Most dealt with BlackWingCat but his site is mainly in Japanese so it wasn't easy to translate everything he was doing and XP did pretty much what I needed Windows 2000 for so I moved on. For Windows 2000 I ended up just using IDE mode and later just did XP with AHCI. When I opened my MSFN account it had nothing to do with you or any of your software as you had no relation to Windows 2000 which was what I was focused on getting to run on the Z77 in AHCI mode. I found your software from googling around that often linked to your site many years ago on other forums about breaking the 98 memory barrier BSOD problem but I was hesitant then about spending some money on some unknown site for some program that may or may not work but saw plenty of positive feedback on other sites that one day I finally decided to just buy the program and hold for storage in case say one day you disappeared or your site went dead I wouldn't be able to try it out. I was preparing to install 98SE on a Z77 down the road when I had more time and was very busy then and because of DOSBOX and at the time I didn't really have that many 98 titles that I wanted to play but now I do thanks to some purchases on eBay and GOG years ago that I stockpiled. I was also not in dire need of your program then but just purchased it as a backup plan in case my 512MB DDR3 test failed to work since I based my theory on the too much memory causing the install to fail. When I finally got the memory and I was installing 98SE on a Z77 that worked successfully that your program sat unused indefinitely as a result. So in a way you could say that purchase turned out to be a donation. As for your Ramdisk I would consider buying it when it gets perfected and had more features I am looking for. This is something that appears you aren't interesting in doing which is fine as it is your program and your design to do what you want. I still think it's a viable product since you stated it's the only one capable of > 4GB and works in DOS/9X/ME for now. Does each Ramdrive letter act as a virtual partition? Could you format it in DOS like a normal disk? The idea was to have an all in one Ramdisk program that could manage lower 32-bit and upper 64-bit memory that could run on 32-bit and or 64-bit CPUs and it would recognize if it was a 32-bit CPU it would only allow access to the 32-bit memory range. But on a 64-bit CPU it would allow the option to create in either bit range or both combined. Having three individual Ramdisk versions unless you are packaging them as one program to sell together instead of individually would only make sense so the user would have access to choose which program they needed to run since the Dual mode program can't even auto detect or function on 32-bit only CPU from what you have stated. Also you threw in this tidbit "Also HIMEMEX uses PSE". I assume that you cannot write an DOS executable that could run on either 32-bit or 64-bit CPU and still be able to work as an all in one Ramdisk program. So at the minimum you will need the 32-bit and the Dual Ramdisk program as a standard package otherwise the user would be screwed if they bought the Dual Ramdisk and then needed to work on a P4 or some older machine. I think the simplest is a feature to uninstall all your Ramdisks then you won't have to keep track of any memory table of deallocated and allocated memory regions and it should work as if were a clean slate before adding any Ramdrive. Problem solved. If you premap where HIMEMEX would only use memory say starting at 4GB> End of Max Memory then there shouldn't be any worries about where the boundaries are located. You're just wiping everything in between 4GB > End of Max Memory and no DOS programs will touch above 4GB and no 9X/ME 32-bit programs touch above 4GB either correct? I'm glad you are explaining what's going on on your end and what the difficulties are in implementing it. This is probably why I didn't get into it because it takes a lot of work to create an idea into code. XXMS RLOEW /U When you say theoretical limit is 2K of what do you mean here? Are you talking about AUS? Does your non XMS Ramdrive allow Allocation unit sizes of 512 bytes to 64KB to be specified for each Ramdisk or can be manually formatted as such? Regarding the 7950GX2 if two of the video cards were emulated to perform a virtual Quad SLI wouldn't it be fine under your Mem Patch? They would only use a combined max of 1GB of video RAM space basically hogging the entire 3GiB-4GiB memory region. But this should leave the first 3GiB to 98SE.

No I was lurking around the internet since 1991 on Lynx. I needed some Fatality codes. But if you want to call pre internet or www it was mainly on BBSs and I was a Sysop which predates these forums. If you were referring to the posting about some website I saw about booting 98SE off a Ramdrive it was not from MSFN and I don't think I even knew about MSFN or that it interested me in 2002 which looks like around the earliest time frame forums starting popping up that I could find listed. I was probably still running 98SE in 2002 and never had issues with too much RAM or did my tweak to max out the memory. Since you are from Brazil was a BBS a huge thing at all down there? Ever try FidoNet?

GeForce 7950 GT came in second on the passmark. But if we are emulating the video card I would try and max out the capabilities of that era. You could virtual SLI two of the GeForce 7950 GX2 if you emulated two of these video cards it would create a virtual quad-SLI without the hot mess of wattage overkill and heat. I think this would still beat the GTX 7900. I wouldn't recommend this as real physical hardware I would go with your pick of 7900GTX for the most powerful single graphics card. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_7_series#GeForce_7950_GT GeForce 7900 GX2 also known as GeForce 7900 GTX Duo The GeForce 7900 GX2 is two videocards stacked to fit as a dual slot solution.[19] This is not like products such as the ASUS Dual GeForce 7800 GT or nVidia's own 7950 GX2, where two GPUs are on the same card. This enables quad-SLI on two PCI Express x16 slots. Other OEM companies have access to the GX2 and it is now available from numerous vendors. The card features a 500 MHz GPU and 1200 MHz effective RAM speed. Although the power of the GX2 is less than the 7900 GTX, each card is more powerful than the 7900 GT. Many issues in this implementation of a dual-GPU unit convinced Nvidia to restrict its sale to OEM companies. The card is extremely long, with only the largest e-ATX cases being able to hold it. Two of the cards operating in quad-SLI also required extremely well designed airflow to function, and demanded a 1000 watt power supply unit. Some tests at higher resolutions for card vs card. I can't imagine what Dual GeForce 7900 GX2 would do in this test. https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/7900vs7950/5.html

Yes xHCI is USB 3.0 and going to be the permanent USB controller from Z170 and up. Windows 9x has been run in RAMdisk since YEARS (using Franck Uberto's XMS ramdisk, usually) and now (last few years) that we have the great flexibility of "grub4dos", there are no problems with initiating the booting from a USB device. I associate the Grub4Dos with Linux origins. I try not to mix anything non DOS non Windows with Linux or MAC OS when it comes to the bootloader. I'll have to investigate further these links. It sounds as if you are saying most ended up as dead ends. I do recall over a decade ago someone had successfully done it and used it as an entertainment center OS in the living room. Ran off of their Ramdrive but they had to use the compact mode install and remove all unnecessary files. They might have even used nLite to compress it to a smaller size to fit into the RAM. If I recall they zipped the entire 98SE and had on a bootable optical this that booted and created the Ramdrive and unzipped the files to the Ramdrive. I can't recall if they copied the zip file to the Ramdrive and unzipped directly off the Ramdrive or if they could only unzip directly off the optical disc because there was insufficient Ramdrive space to store both. It also might be easier playing around with Windows 3.1 first. But having a 9X/ME OS on Ramdisk that you could hook up to a USB port and boot off someone's machine without needing to open it up and run something on it would be interesting. I do recall bringing my USB flash drive to Best Buy and running Mame programs on it in the command prompt so this would be taking a step further. XP and W7 I'm sure it's a lot more complicated to achieve as USB bootable with Ramdrive from some sites I've seen that I'm not ready to tackle yet. Plus I would have to figure out how to ensure the Ramdrive would be created for the XP to run off of which may complicate things. XP would be more robust and more useful.

DOSKEY is probably the most useful one that I came across only to retype a previous command. But what is so hard about using DOS? Just keep doing the commands over and over and it becomes second nature. Plus it'll up your keyboard WPM. If you are tired of typing certain commands to run a program with command line switches then create a batch file and use a short filename to run it. . For example made up program. C:\> Prince /adlib /v800 /sb /i5 . Either use EDIT command and type that in and save as "P.BAT" so when you type P at the command prompt it will type all that for you. you can use COPY CON P.BAT type the program commands here hit F6 key or Ctrl-Z and enter to save the batch file. Remember to move the batch file to the directory of your program. Copy P.Bat to C:\PRINCE or Move P.Bat to C:\PRINCE . However you could make the program go into your PRINCE subdirectory say the DOS program was located in the PRINCE directory of your C: . The P.Bat file could have this inside it: C: CD\PRINCE Prince /adlib /v800 /sb /i5 CD\ . That will do all the work for you in one stroke of the "P" key. . Another way is using a Front End ASCII GUI but that would use more conventional memory which some DOS programs can be uptight about and won't run. .

The 128GB limit isn't a deal breaker for DOS and 9X/ME and using FDISK for about 34 years you learn how to use it properly despite any limitations created over time. The percentages input aren't accurate as specifying the exact MB in FDISK. I actually spent the time to calculate all FDISK partition sizes from the smallest to the largest and ran through test after test and I also observed XP Windows Disk Management sizes reported after creating the partition in DOS and did the reverse in XP and there were differences. There are a couple numbers you can enter and it will kick FDISK back to the Main Menu which is a strange bug I discovered. The largest you can do is 99999 or 100GB with manual entry on FDISK v2. However I don't recommend using that partition size. One of the biggest problems is the verifying drive integrity when you create a new partition it has to check it first which takes a long time. I still wouldn't recommend using a drive over 128GB for simplification and no need to software patch everything. Is your software patch to the FAT per drive only meaning each individual hard drive in the system needs to be patched? Is this a DOS patch or overall software patch that works on any OS? If you were to destroy all the partitions and then use FDISK to create a new partition and make a bootable DOS drive I assume your patch is gone again and it would need to be reapplied? And assuming it's some FAT patch per drive I would still have to remember which drives I have patched or didn't or is there a way to do a check it was patched in DOS or Windows? Using a 120GB/128GB drive hardware solution really is the best method for the Primary drive. I just don't have to think about corruption ever happening. Even a 160GB could be used safely to work if you FDisk up to 128GB and don't include the rest of the capacity in the Extended partition to prevent accidentally allocating it as partition space. A quick and dirty way to do this is 2GB FAT16 Primary Partition, then for the Extended Partition just enter 99999. This will cut it to about 102GB but fastest way to avoid the corruption issue. You could use the % to calculate close to 126GB but not go over. I think 78% might be the right value to input for the Extended Partition. If you need really large capacity hard drives > 200GB I would use them externally via USB instead although I haven't tested the 9X/ME USB storage size limits I would think it should probably be the same as XP at 2TB. I kind of doubt anyone in 9X/ME is going to need over 128GB for most of their OS storage needs so any extra storage can be done via USB external drives. The All Options selected Full size 98SE install is around 400MB on a recent test. It's better to use the FAT16 2GB for the Primary Boot Partition. It retains the backward compatibility for older DOS programs which don't like FAT32 partitions. The other partitions can be FAT16 limited to 2GB or bigger >2GB with FAT32. Any picky programs you can copy from the FAT32 partition to the FAT16 bootable partition to run in DOS without problems. If the C: gets corrupted I'll use a bootable 98SE floppy disk to access the hard drive and I just restore the OS boot image off the other partition and takes but a second. The Extended Partition can be the remaining capacity of the 128GB drive -2GB. Then you can build the first logical drive at 64GB if you want the largest compatible partition but you must format it in DOS only if you want to use for storing OS images. The remaining partitions can be 32GB, 16GB, 8GB, or 4GB as needed till the drive capacity is used up. 32GB max works good too in case you need to reformat in Windows XP instead of DOS since XP restricts to 32GB partitions without 3rd party software. The max you would usually need in 98SE being used a common daily OS would be 16GB max from my experience. I tried living on 8GB in XP and eventually ran out of space. 32GB would be plenty for 9X for many years. Also redirecting your Programs Folder to a 3rd Partition would be a good way to reduce the entire OS size from being combined with all your programs which will making your OS images bloated. . For the most simplest Partitioning of the 120GB/128GB and fool proof. 9X/ME/2K/XP MultiBoot Partition Breakdown: FDISK MB sizes (2047 Primary, Extended / Logical Drives 32765, 32765, 32765, left over space) . C: 2GB FAT16 - DOS, 9X/ME - simplest setup D: 32GB FAT32 - 2K can be 9X/ME/2K if space is required E: 32GB FAT32 - XP F: 32GB FAT32 - Program Files and My Documents location. G: 22GB-30GB Remaining capacity can be partitioned off as one partition used for storing OS boot partition image or OS image. .

Qemm is for DOS Memory manager. Where is this Helix Hurricane?

It's been awhile but on the Dollar Menu they used to be $1 plus tax. Then they got rid of it. That would be bad to mislead people that a McDonald's hamburger is close to the price of the Limitation Patch. . The cost of about 7 McRib sandwiches sounds about right. How much do Hamburger's cost in your area? How things have changed since then. http://www.businessinsider.com/the-first-mcdonalds-burger-stand-2014-9

I also concur 128GB or 120GB Max capacity. Nice to know the ME FDISK fixed some issues. I'll need to get a hold of that for testing. 98SE FDISK v2 fixed over 64GB.

Have you already tested some 8 series nVidia video cards to confirm this? Which models did you test? What affect do these Unified Shaders have on the functionality in a game? Can you still run some low end games that weren't taxing the 3D side of things without issues? Starcraft 1 seemed to be very low spec to test. There is a 7950 GX2 which should beat the 7900 GTX. Seems to be a link discussing this. http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/203362-33-7900-7950-which-better I'm working on testing if something higher than an ATI X800 series will work in 9X/ME. I'm trying to mod some of the drivers for testing it out later. It took several hours to compare 2000 and XP differences. It might be possible to backport some of the graphics cards for Windows 2000 that only had XP drivers. As for the Voodoo 5 5500 weren't there some DOS or Windows games that made use of it that the nVidia graphics cards didn't or couldn't?

H110 that's Skylake. However I don't recall any 3D capability correct? We need some sort of 9X/ME video card emulator for XP and Windows 7. All the user would need is the original video card and dump it somehow. The video card emulator could work with any iGPU or a discrete graphics card to do the work. This would solve a lot of headaches for 9X/ME. But for Midi emulation in DOS that's another problem without a PCI slot even though that is a half azzed attempt of a genuine ISA version. A SB Audigy sound card emulator might be needed for some of the EAX effects to pass to the Intel or AMD HD HDMI Audio or a real PCIe sound card. After that's solved it should be able to run just about every DOS / 9X/ME game on a modern computer. Have you tested any 3D games with BearWindow's driver? Was the performance lackluster or even possible?

Does this include xHCI? I would only keep it to 9X DOS no Linux. Regarding just regular USB 2.0 9x unzipped to Ramdisk to run. Any special Windows files need patching to make this work? I remember it crashed.

You don't need to hunt down that model. It's the chipset that's important. Plenty of those found cheaper if you look carefully jaclaz. The PC'em looks promising. It has AdLib Gold emulation. Unfortunately, the graphics cards are quite low end in performance. No nVidia 7950 GX2 or Voodoo 5 5500 emulation yet. Missing Sound Blaster AWE 64 Gold Emulation. I got a few of these in storage including a few sealed ones. If there is a way to extract the chip Roms I'd help her out. I got a ton of video cards dating back from early 80s including some Monochrome ones which are rare. But props that Sarah Walker if that's a real woman to do such amazing work. I recall seeing this as Version 0.1 and that was 2007. How fast a decade has flown by now at version 12. I might test it out now just to see how it functions. When I can set some time for it I will start with V0.1 and move all the way up to V12 to see how it progressed over the decade of tweaking.

DosBox-thingie? is this some variant of DosBOX? That's not the biggest hurdle. It's getting a PCIe video card that didn't have 9X/ME driver support to function in 9X/ME VM without proper drivers it's as good as the standard VGA display driver which is worse than the BearWindows driver. This is why finding a way to either extract and emulate a 7950 GX2 using your own video card is the next best thing. The processing power of even a low end graphics card or iGPU can more than adequately handle the emulation. Actually the VMWare people are inept when it comes to backward compatibility. The best earliest competitors were Connectix Virtual PC which actually included a bootable copy of WinME and even IBM PC DOS 7, it included Sound Blaster sound card emulation, and emulated one of those common VGA video cards like a Tseng or S3 Virge and I think that card even had Windows 3.1 and 9X drivers that functioned inside the VM. But had Connectix "NOT" been bought out by the grubby hands of Microsoft I'm sure today we would have a clear 9X/ME VM that could be modified to emulate a Voodoo 5 5500 and a top end 7950 GX2. Sadly many great companies were absorbed by Microsoft and died a horrible death. Today's Microsoft Virtual PC is a joke in comparison. The sad truth is money does things to innovators with good ideas. The same reason why anyone created DosBox. Why did they bother? They didn't profit off it. They wanted to prevent DOS from dying and not just DOS alone but the Sound Blaster and MIDI interface for starters to fully replicate as close as possible a working DOS machine from the 386/486 era. There are still some syntax issues that are incorrect that i noticed but functionally it's a good alternative on a modern machine. Would Loew do it? I can't answer that as I don't really know how much free time or if he has the skillset to pull it off by himself. He'd need a team like DosBox had. And if the end goal is keeping 9X/ME alive maybe he would volunteer some of his knowledge. If it's all about money then yes I agree maybe it won't happen. As for how long it would really take only he could make a proper estimate. He reads this thread so if he said 5 to 10 years solo then most likely he wouldn't do it. If he had a team and it would take 1-3 years I'm sure it would be feasible.

Actually it wasn't about just one drive letter. But the fact your original Ramdisk split the 32-bit and 64-bit locations into two separate memory chunks. Also the creation using just a single drive letter would be bonus as you can attest. The 23 to 26 MAX Ramdisks was to do some tests to stretch the limits of your Ramdisk. Most Ramdisks might be limited to one drive only. I'll have to do some tests to see if this is true. Obviously I'm talking about storing the DOS or Windows files on the Ramdisk. The program itself would still use conventional memory to run. I just only asking if it acted like a hard drive but at RAM speed. I'm going to assume this is a yes as somehow that confused you in what I was asking. I only asked this to give other users ideas to make use of your non XMS Ramdrive program. I haven't tested it but since it's your product you would know if it were capable. This would be a better solution than using a Hard drive or SSD and could be installed on any modern system via bootable USB method. The only issue is PS/2 Keyboard or USB keyboard and USB mouse on xHCI ports or if 9X/ME can even run on it. Once that's solved you would have a complete functional 9X/ME OS running in RAM. So you are saying if you used the Dual Ramdisk file on a 386 or a 32-bit only CPU it would not be able to function or recognize to only use the 32-bit Ramdisk code and memory region? Perhaps allocating each possible Ramdrive to start in every consecutive 1GB region per letter would simplify it. C: Hard drive If you had D: starting at 4GB 64bit region (1GB) - so removing Ramdrives could only be done at the 64-bit memory region to avoid compatibility issues and also the 32-bit region that is salvageable seems to not be a constant. E: at 5GB (1GB) F: at 6GB (1GB) G: Unallocated 7GB to Max Memory -> If you deallocated E: (1GB) and reallocated a new Ramdrive it would start at the next unallocated 1GB location in this case 7GB rather than trying to pinpoint or locate space to use in between Ramdrives or reuse the original 5GB->6GB location that E: originally used. Less complexity for you and needing the program to try and track down to reallocate freed memory could be a nightmare. Eventually you would have to reboot using this method when you reached the memory limit since you're not reusing the freed up memory. It might be more efficient if you broke it down to smaller than 1GB regions but the math would probably kill you so I think this method would be easier to code and a smaller footprint. Or maybe deallocating and reallocating freed space could only be used in 1GB or 1GB incremental sizes only to simplify the process. If you had deallocated E: (1GB) and F: (1GB) you can reuse the freed 2GB or create a 2GB or greater Ramdrive since no other driver letters have allocated any memory past the 7GB region. So deallocation and reallocation of freed memory could only work towards the end of the Ramdrive first. But as for the XXMS RLOEW/u option I proposed to Deallocate all the Ramdrives together to a clean slate I don't see how that would be difficult to do and you could start over from scratch to reallocate whatever Ramdrive sizes you wanted. To maximize compatibility for W9X/ME and DOS programs. Would it better for your 64-bit Ramdisk or Dual Ramdisk to just only deal with the 4GB and greater memory region only since most other XMS, EMS, and alternate Ramdisks can only make use of the first 4GiB region? I'm unsure where this 1GiB System Arena space resides within the 0-4GiB region. Since you know this limit better you and had stated previously that WinME got close to 2GiB 1.9XGiB in a previous comment. If Win9X/ME never touches memory above the 2GiB region then I can see adding those unused 2GiB in the 2GiB to 4GiB region into the Dual Ramdisk program for memory allocation. Again I'm unsure and haven't tested all DOS Ramdisks or Windows 9X/ME that weren't created by you to know their limits of how far they are capable of allocating memory to prevent clashing with your non XMS Ramdisk. Then you also mentioned video cards needing MMIO space in the 3GiB to 4GiB region. Maximum graphics card was probably 512MB that could function in 9X/ME. So is the real free allocatable memory in the 32-bit region only 512MB? Actually it takes more work to use Bytes than KiB. Bytes was the standard method of expressing the memory amount in DOS as far as I can remember. But thanks for acknowledging the 512 Bytes is the minimum size Ramdisk that could be created per drive letter. I'm sure this might be as low or lower than other comparable ones. I actually have bought your main product before and promoted it several times on other sites otherwise I wouldn't be here. And often times you get a lot of heat for evening mentioning 9X/ME let alone XP. I didn't buy it because I really needed it since I had older equipment that could do the job without patching but I did it to support your efforts. But now I'm starting to see the death of 9X/ME on modern systems and your sales will go down so I'm only throwing some possible ideas that could make some of your current tools better or help suggest ideas to modify them to be improved or make their functionality more versatile. And those who find the additional tweaks useful will purchase your program as a benefit. Once you're gone there won't be any one with the possible know how to modify your programs even with the source code in hand assuming someone would be willing to go through all the trouble to learn Assembly, C++ or other machine languages and recompile, debug, and test everything. By then it would be pointless and too late or futile. If you're okay with it dying off or sales dropping I'm not here to force you to do anything and let things be. If it's not about money and it's the niche community then these programs will still benefit a refresh or update if one day you decide to give it up and go on a vacation and retire from all of this. But from the DOS perspective even if the 9X/ME dies off your DOS programs would still live on assuming Intel or AMD doesn't do something drastic to kill off conventional memory or break your non XMS Ramdrive from being accessible due to some Chipset refresh. On the Z170 the Himem.Sys compatibility break, Format with Sys broken, the PCI slot coffin, and the eHCI removal are just the start of what's coming and only a matter of time before 9X/ME won't be usable from a gaming perspective where I assume most of your customers are buying your patches for since all other non gaming 9X/ME software runs fine in XP but DOS programs should outlast them all. Most won't get 9X/ME to install to even use your patches if it can't format a bootable partition. As for AMD AM4 I have no clue as to compatibility with your DOS and 9X/ME programs as no one here owns one to do any real testing to confirm so the AMD coffin status is unknown.

Acorn. Sadly most of the UK and European computers were not popular in the United States. However thanks to emulators I may try out some of my older games that existed on many platforms including your ZX-80. I have a TI-44/A which is one of the oldest and had 256 bytes of RAM. As long as you understood the intent of branding and having a proper name helps popularize a product. That's why I stated 8GB would be probably the maximum needed on 9X/ME installed which means you get about 5GB for the RamDrive which is enough to fit one DVD iso. Although most DVDs are 4.7GB to 8GB in size and they did exist during 9X/ME time frame. The biggest production probably I can think of for 9X/ME was Wing Commander IV existed on a special DVD-rom release and was one of the first DVD-rom games that came as a combo with some Sound Blaster DVD kits. But if you are playing Minesweeper or Solitaire then yes this would be an excessive use of system RAM to have such a larger Ramdrive even beyond 700MB which is good enough for most CD-rom based titles. Virtualization is good to consider now. Z170 has killed 9X/ME or at least opened the coffin door. We need to develop a 9X/ME Box emulator and later add 9X/ME video card emulator. If R.Loew knows how to do it I will support him to test for errors to be fixed. But only DosBOX emulator is successful but I don't believe you can run 9X/ME inside it. And even if you could get that far there is still the problem of video card emulator for 2D/3D graphics of that era. Sound card for Sound Blaster emulator looks easily available and can be ported easily from DosBOX. Any sluggishness on a Quad core would be negligible today if a 9X/ME VM BOX is created it would run very fast in XP. This is why 9X/ME VM BOX will solve this dilemma. Otherwise you have to use actual hardware and I think using 9X/ME VM BOX inside XP will be blazingly fast and not require a special DOS Ramdrive but use an XP Ramdrive which is more customizable and more efficient use of resources. The biggest hurdle is emulating the video card of nVidia 7950 GX2 which I believe is the fastest most powerful for 9X/ME. Second is Voodoo 5 card emulation for 9X/ME VM BOX. That is why I propose using Intel HD iGPU and AMD iGPU to do the video card emulation of both nVidia 7950 GX2 and Voodoo 5 model 5500 as the Intel or AMD iGPU should be multiple times more powerful than these 9X/ME graphics cards could produce and no more fan noise or massive wattage and heat to deal with as a bonus. The big Question is how long will it take and can it be done and the only person I can think of that might be able to pull it off given his background is R. Loew.

What is the maximum standard XMS limit for other Ramdrives than yours since this is useful information to advertise. This is why I recommended this idea to combine your 32-bit and 64-bit Ramdisk into one product. Now have you worked it out so that this dual mode version works on early 32-bit computers dating to 386 as well when it detects non 64-bit CPUs? I would recode so the default size specified is recognized in Bytes as all DOS programs or people who would normally use DOS Ramdisks followed this standard despite today we have GB and TB of RAM this is still a DOS program where each byte is critical. In Windows only Ramdisks KB is more appropriate. It is more critical to know exactly how many bytes to allocate to prevent a program from not functioning. Your minimum conventional memory used is the HIMEMEX, plus the Command Line program 3KB + Ramdrive size. Here is the optimal way to add the syntax for your dual mode Ramdisk. XXMS X:/32b1=2097152 Forces as the first Ramdisk shown in XXMS /c option. or XXMS X:/32b=2097152 Removing the designated number after 32b or 64b It will automatically assign it the next number in sequence. creates drive X: XXMS 32-bit Ramdisk 2GB adding further command line options to assign the same 2GB Ramdrive using more modern capacity terminology. XXMS X:/32b1=2048KB XXMS X:/32b1=2GB . For future applications of larger Ramdrives we will see 10 to 20 years from now: XXMS X:/32b1=2TB Will create an X: drive with 2TB Ramdrive . XXMS X:/32b1=2PB Will create an X: drive with 2PB Ramdrive . Three ways of implementing the same result: XXMS /Allb=1TB or XXMS /All=1TB or XXMS /A=1TB Removing the designated number after 32b or 64b It will automatically assign it the next number in sequence AND removing the drive letter parameter it will assign the next available drive letter after the last hard drive or SSD partition drive letter. If say Hard drives or SSDs partitions used up to drive letter H:. creates drive I: XXMS 32-bit and 64-bit combined Ramdisk for 1TB total. You don't need to deal with differentiating KB with KiB or MB with MiB or GB with GiB, TB with TiB. Too much overly PC talk these days. Most computer users using your program already assume 1KB = 1024 bytes if you grew up in the heyday. Back in the early DOS days people knew this is the accepted standard. It's only computer hard drive manufacturers that decided to rip consumers off using the 1000 bytes = 1KB instead of the true 1024 bytes = 1KB that these fake new capacity naming schemes started. This should be a future feature to consider in the final revision since you are still working on it. Constantly rebooting in order to reassign new Ramdrives is not very convenient in DOS and more relevant on much older 386 or earlier systems where boot time is a factor. If you could manually uninstall or change and list the Ramdrive sizes without rebooting the computer which most DOS programs practiced religiously was a sign of good efficient code. Even on today's modern systems there still a very significant lag time to rebooting a machine or if booting off a USB floppy it is even more noticeable. Your program should excel at this given your expertise in coding this should be a piece of cake to implement. 98SE

EMS is for a special few DOS programs that used a combination of EMS and XMS to function. A few Origin titles used this combination. What programs did you use to get emulated EMS? Have you use RL's Ramdrive in conjunction with the EMS? The Syntech adapter you referenced is a little better than the riser adapter jaclaz mentioned which I had seen before he mentioned it and I crossed it off my list a long time ago. But the motherboard that seems to fit the adapter you mentioned would be smaller than a standard ATX so you can use the free space next to the left most PCIe slot to mount it. This adapter would be well suited for adding a legacy PCI sound card into a pure PCIe slots only motherboard found in Z170 usually and later. As for does it actually work? The USB 2.0 PCIe card exists so this adapter would not be required. Have you found any PCI to ISA or PCIe to ISA adapters that functioned properly? Have you seen any PCI to AGP or PCIe to AGP adapters which would open up 9X/ME compatibility on Z170 and later.

It depends on name given but the XMS and Ramdrive are the only relevant words in the title that attract me for now. I'll have to investigate deeper into the other Ramdrives to do a full analysis of each of their limits where yours has a clear advantage other than > 4GB in size to improve the name. I assume most other XMS Ramdrives are not able to access 64-bit memory which the most obvious advantage to make known. Going by your estimates the maximum conventional memory used for 23 Drive Letters is 69KB (D: to Z:) If it can also use A: and B: unused letters that would bring it to 75KB. Would there be a way to reduce this footprint further? If the first Ramdrive letter is created could the additional ones use less than 3KB code chained off the first Ramdrive into the HIMEMEX? Or write the entire code and use just the 3KB footprint in conventional memory but inside the HIMEMEX place the extra additional code to reserve 25-26 drive letter possibilities without impacting conventional memory for each drive letter. As for the MEMORY64 package I can't comment on its advantages today but I'm sure you or others who use it can. If I knew what you knew I'd help write applications for it since I have all the possible hardware that existed back in the late 70s till now. For the time being only you and maybe a few handful of your generation are still alive and kicking with the knowledge you possess to write these programs. If I had studied this stuff back then I would have tried to help you out today. I was more into program design and user interface. Can you clarify what this means? If I copy any DOS program into your HimemX region and run it are you saying it will crash or not function? What about copying the entire Windows 9X or ME OS into it and running Win? Is there a way for your program to reassign C: harddrive/SSD partition to another designated letter so your Ramdrive can steal the C: letter? Have you attempted to boot off a USB flash drive, create your large Ramdrive and unzip the the entire contents of your working 9X/ME into it and then running 9X/ME off just your Ramdrive to see if it functions properly?