rloew

I don't have a suitable video card either, if I did I'd be quite glad to test the patch myself. I have purchased and tested a GeForcd 6200 512MB AGP Graphics Card. The Installation CD was limited to XP and Vista, but NVIDIA offers their Forceware 81.98 which works fine. The NVIDIA Driver doesn't appear to allocate the entire AGP Aperture so it doesn't appear to be limited to 256MB. A 1024MB may work also. I haen't tested the 82.69 Driver but someone else has (see below) so 512MB Cards should work with it. The AGP allocation issue occurs in the ATI RADEON 9600. Since it is only 128MB, there is no problem, but a 512MB Card, with a similar driver, would cause problems. One person, who answered my request for Beta Testers, has a GeForce 7600GT 512MB AGP Card. He had no problem related to the AGP size but had a Shutdown problem that appears to be unrelated. He has used the NVIDIA 82.69 Driver without Problems. I am still looking for Testers who have access to 512MB or larger Graphics Cards with Windows 9X compatable drivers to test my Beta AGP Patch.

I have purchased and tested a GeForcd 6200 512MB AGP Graphics Card. The Installation CD was limited to XP and Vista, but NVIDIA offers their Forceware 81.98 which works fine. The NVIDIA Driver doesn't appear to allocate the entire AGP Aperture so it doesn't appear to be limited to 256MB. A 1024MB may work also. The AGP allocation issue occurs in the ATI RADEON 9600. Since it is only 128MB, there is no problem, but a 512MB Card, with a similar driver, would cause problems. One person, who answered my request for Beta Testers, has a GeForce 7600GT 512MB AGP Card. He had no problem related to the AGP size but had a Shutdown problem that appears to be unrelated. He has used the NVIDIA 82.69 Driver without Problems. I am still looking for Testers who have access to 512MB or larger Graphics Cards with Windows 9X compatable drivers to test my Beta AGP Patch.

That's all great news Tihiy. I might be wrong but I don't think rloew is into an heap expander at all as he's mentioned ongoing research into 512 MB graphic card and multiprocessor support and did not answer a question aboit a heap expander I made to him sometimes ago. I haven't been working on the Resource problem in a while. Early analysis showed that there is no central block of code that handles them. It appears that many if not all particular Resources are coded individually. I haven't worked with 16-bIT Thunks, so it would take me a lot longer to identify and Patch all of the code that handles Resources. Even Patching one Resource at a time would not be easy since I don't know an easy way of determining all of the pathways to a given Resource. I have only been looking at the 512MB Graphics Card issue for a matter of days. So far only one person has contacted me about testing. I have thought about making use of Multiple Pocessors or Cores but only under Program Control, not the OS. I have not done the research or written any code yet.

DOS SCANDISK can handle a 1.5TB Partition without problems and did not complain when given a 2TB experimental Partition. Windows ME SCANDISK and DEFRAG can handle more than 1TB, but the Partition must be Formatted with 64KB Clusters, which is non-standard.

In a running system it should not matter. If you are installing a new system with a lot or RAM already present, you will need to Install the RAM Limitation Patch first. The two packages are unrelated so mixing functions would be inappropriate. In any case, I doubt the Authors of KernelEX would be willing to switch their Software to Commercial Status.

I have developed a Patch that should allow the use of 512MB Graphics Cards with Windows 9X. I do not have a Card to test. If anyone has a 512MB Graphics Card and a Windows 9X driver for it, and is interested in doing some testing, contact me at rloew@hotmail.com

FYI: http://web.archive.org/web/20040107022513/...e.com/xdos.html Or you actually did it BEFORE July 14, 2002 and are telling about it after 7 years? B) jaclaz Doing it with ME is a lot easier than 98SE due to the smaller IO.SYS. There wasn't much documentation on how to set it up. He had files in it that predate Windows 95 and several files that were not needed. One file needed to be moved to another location. He didn't leave enough room for a Registry. Without a Registry, IO.SYS will look for one on the Hard Drives and can crash if it finds one. It also needed my RAM Limitation Patch to run in a 4GB RAM Machine. I have written hundreds of Programs and Packages before July 14, 2002 that I haven't posted in a forum. This wasn't one of them.

You are not the only one. FYI: http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=10623 http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=12326 http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showforum=53 jaclaz Maybe not, but I bet I am the first to fit 32-Bit DOS into a standard Floppy Disk.

Interesting article on 32-Bit DOS. Thanks. I developed a CDROM that boots Windows 98SE from RAMDISK without needing any Hard Drive. I avoided the Long Filename issues by doing an image copy to my RAMDISK. The limit was in the original driver not OSR 2. My Patch supports all of the Operating Systems you listed, not just 98SE. It also can Patch the original Windows 95 Driver fixing the 32GB limit as well. The verify feature would be important to many people who don't want the risk of corruption if the Patch is accidentally overwritten. The author of the Patch you listed, has been banned, and is no longer supporting her Patch.

This discussion about who is on top of whom isn't going anywhere. As I stated before, Windows bootstraps itself using DOS and can then work pretty much on it's own. Eidenk's engine analogy is valid. Of course a diesel engine without a starter is pretty much useless. The point is that Windows 95, 98 and ME are all the SAME with respect to this issue, so it doesn't help answer the question that started this thread. I personally didn't like the DOS restrictions in ME so I concentrated my attention on Windows 98SE. Todays experiment shows a way around that without making a lot of modifications.

The Windows ME defragmenter will defrag up to 1TB Partitions. It isn't fast but I haven't seen it cause corruption. There is no BIOS battery only the CMOS Battery. Check the header on the motherboard for the case connections such as Power, Reset, Disk Activity etc. If there are speaker pins, you will need to connect tehm to a speaker. If not, there probably is a small buzzer somewhere on the motherboard that should make the beeps. Plug in the CPU and REMOVE ALL of the RAM. You should get some beeps. Swap the CMOS battery to be sure. If you don't get any beeps then the CPU is not running.

The 32GB limit is a flaw in the original version of ESDI_506.PDR in Windows 95. It will access more than 32GB, but if for any reason a retry occurs, it switches to CHS mode and will corrupt the Hard Drive if the access was above 32GB. All of the Windows versions mentioned are limited to 137GB as they only support 28-Bit LBA. Unless running in compatability mode, they do not use the BIOS. The BIOS must also support 48-Bit LBA, for proper operation, since it is used during Boot before the Hard Disk Driver is loaded. The 2TB limit is a separate limit due to 32-Bit Sector Addressing. I have written software for Windows 9X to go beyond 2TB. You may have allocated Partitions extending above the 137GB limit but the problem won't occur until you actually try to put data into sectors above the limit. You will then encounter errors or corruption of files in lower sectors. Newly created files may seem OK but they will have overwriiten other files. SCANDISK will not detect the damage if it is confined to the data sectors of files. Drivers such as the Intel Application Accelerator or my High Capacity Disk Patch do add support to Windows above 137GB. The Disk Manufacturers Installers supplement the BIOS as does my BOOTMAN. I have had problems getting the Disk Manufacturers Installers to work properly so I wrote my own. These are two entirely separate fixes.

VMM may or may not use any DOS code in a normal configuration but it is capable of using DOS drivers after taking over. I did the following experiment: 1. Renamed VMM32.VXD to VMM32.EXE 2. Booted Windows ME. 3. When prompted for the Windows loader, I typed DEBUG.EXE 4. Loaded and Installed my NON-XMS 32-Bit RAMDISK from DEBUG. 5. Put a file in the RAMDISK. 6. Exited Debug. 7. Loaded Windows by typing WINDOWS\SYSTEM\VMM32 8. Opened My Computer, then the RAMDISK, and verified that the files were there. Windows ME does snapshot the DOS code and makes it available for VMs IO.SYS loads a full DOS Kernel but does not load the COMMAND.COM shell. You can load the SHELL as follows: 1. Rename VMM32.VXD to VMM32.EXE 2. Create a modified COMMAND.COM called COMMANDX.COM that ignores the boot mode flags. 3. Boot Windows ME. 4. When prompted for the Windows loader, type COMMANDX.COM If you copy COMMANDX.COM to VMM32.VXD (after renaming the original as above) you will enter the Shell on boot. You can then switch to Windows by running VMM32.EXE. Technically none of these Operating Systems run "On Top" of DOS. They use their own 32-Bit Code to do as much as possible, only using DOS Code when accessing a Real Mode only Driver or when using a DOS VM.

My Patch will support up to 4GB of RAM without other support.

There are a number of possible problems that would cause corruption. 1. Your BIOS may not support Hard Drives larger than 137GB. Does the BIOS report the true size of your Hard Drive? Windows uses the BIOS until it switches to the ESDI_506.PDR Driver. It also uses the BIOS in Safe Mode or Compatability Mode. If your BIOS does not support Large Hard Drives, you will need a DDO such as my BOOTMAN Package to provide the needed support. You can download the Demo version of it or my High Capacity Disk Patch and use the 48BITLBA.EXE test program from DOS to test your Computer. Go to http://rloew1.no-ip.com to get the Demo Files. 2. Diskeeper is flawed. I tested a trial version a while back. It corrupted my test Partition when I exceeded approximately 190GB of data. Your Partition is 310GB, so you could have exceeded that limit. I brought the problem to the attention of Diskeeper but they didn't care. 3. The 137GB Patch you installed could have been overwritten if any update you used replaced the ESDI_506.PDR file. I added a Verify feature to my High Capacity Disk Patch to detect this problem before any corruption could occur. The LLXX Patch on MSFN does not have this feature. 4. Though not applicable to you, another cause are bad USB drivers in Windows 98FE and possibly Windows 95 that can corrupt files when transferring data between internal Drives and USB Drives.

I don't have a Windows 95 Setup to test USB on, but I have found that Windows 98 FE (not SE) has flawed USB Drivers. Copying large amounts of data between an IDE Drive and an USB Drive sometimes results in serious corruption of either or both Drives. Since Windows 95 is older than Windows 98 FE, this problem may exist in Windows 95 also.

There are some issues with SATA Controllers operating in "Native" Mode. I have written a Patch and created an INF file to support SATA. Go to http://rloew1.no-ip.com for more information.

Not so. I have a Windows XP system that got infected with WIN32:Vitro. It infects every executable that gets opened. It even infected an executable on one of my Windows 98SE Computers whn I tried to copy a program into the XP machine. Fortunately the virus crashed when I used the program in Windows 98SE. This led me to discover the Virus. I ended up having to write a disinfector since the Anti-Virus programs I found could not disinfect the executables but would just delete them, leaving a useless system.

Didn't know there were P I CPUs above 233MHz. Admittedly, I'm not very familiar with the AMD family - always used Intel CPUs (actually I've also used Cyrix ones back when tinkering with P I machines). AMD made P1 replacements up to 500MHz. I have always preferred AMD Processors. They give me more control especially for SMM and Memory. Definitely not the one I have. The CMOVcc instruction and a PREFETCH instruction (after emulating CMOVcc) appear in the Dialog when GVC.DLL crashes. Apparently GRETECH didn't think CMOVcc was useless, there are plenty of them in GVC.DLL. It was slow and choppy. I probably won't be using it for general viewing. I plan to Patch the GVC.DLL file to eliminate the CMOVcc instructions to see if it is any faster. The TYAN S1590 supports up to 384MB of RAM.

Not totally true. There are ways to hook code to get around hardware issues. I ported GOMPlayer to an 11 Year Old TYAN S1590 using an AMD 450MHz where it prompt crashed. The AMD 450MHz CPU is a Pentium 1 Class Processor. GOMPlayer uses P6 instructions such as CMOVcc. I created an Intercept VXD that emulated the missing Instructions and was able to use GOMPlayer without Patching it's code.

Lexmark also pulled all of their Windows 98 drivers. Fortunately both announced in advance that they were removing them so I did a download ALL on the driver sections of their websites. It took a few months to download over 700GB and the deadline passed while I was doing it. I downloaded the most important parts first so I don't think I missed anything important. Interestingly, HP still had Windows 3.1 drivers when I last looked at their website.

This may make Win9x safe for the Internet. Which hacker or governmental spy agency would want to develop new malware to attack a tiny disappearing minority of 0.32% ? Furthermore, the knowhow about Win9x seems to be disappearing rapidly.<snip /> Definitely, I recently got one of my XP setups infected with WIN32:Vitro and it spread though one of my shares into a 98SE system where it promptly died. The damaged executable led me to discover the infection in the XP system.

My RAM Limitation Patch will solve your problem with Windows ME without having to remove RAM.

The Patch on PC World is my Demo. They probably copied it off Simtel as do a lot of other websites. I'm not sure why they did not put my name as Author. The screenshot link points directly into my Website, not theirs.

On your first system, you can try unistalling and reinstalling my Version 6.0 Patch using the "/M" option. This rearranges low RAM and helps solve some issues. As for your 2.5gb system, the lack of drivers is a problem we share. I have two systems that have little support for Windows 9X. I have developed a solution for unsupported SATA controllers but not for anything else. Sometimes you can find related drivers but there are no guarantees. The alternative is to add cards for functions that you need but are not supported such as Ethernet, Audio, Video etc.