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Bunch of questions on FreeDos (memory managers) (Users)

posted by Arjay, 27.06.2010, 01:04
(edited by Arjay on 27.06.2010, 01:14)

> Hi People!
 Hi Misha,
Welcome always nice to see a new poster!

> So Duke3d (thats my favourite) runs without problems, and thats probably it
> is something dos4gw, and doesnt need memory managers.
DOS4GW is a DOS extender - basically it acts as a memory manager and does other things!

> Also some very old games like f.e. Tower Toppler ran ok only if i
> disabled HIMEM driver, otherwise it told me smtng like "Invalid executable format".
Ok. I wasn't that familiar with this game, so I looked it up on Mobygames: Tower Toppler and can see it came out in 1988. HIMEM came out in 1989, so in other words the game predates HIMEM and thus wouldn't have known anything about it. Knowing the games as this time it would have been doing even more "low level" things, so to be honest I'm not surprised it doesn't like HIMEM.
So I guess you know the answer for this game: don't run it with himem ;)

> The game Tyrian refuse to run at all, giving runtime error :-( .
Ok. In English this means your computer is too fast to run the game which was written in the Turbo Pascal programming language. You need a program called TPPATCH. For a download link and some information on how to use it please see this earlier post by myself. If you get stuck just reply here.

> And the game is cool.
:)

> Also it doesn't show any video memory, which must be part of
> system memory (I'm not sure it should thou).
Without going technical. For historical reasons some video memory appears as part system memory but "only a small amount". Modern computers however have a lot of video memory which MEM doesn't display information or even know about.

> Ok, so what about EMS? I tried emm386.exe, Jemm.exe both and my system just
> crashes, so i stopped experimenting with that.
EMM386 certainly always slowed computer games down, indeed personally I have always avoided EMS where possible (for historical reasons). Still I would suggest using JEMM not EMM386.

> I remember, in ms-dos i used qemm.exe with a lot of line parameters.
 QEMM was ok. Think of JEMM as being the next evolution of QEMM. It's very good, flexible and importantly is written by a very good programmer, Japheth.

> Playing Duke is not the reason why i decided to go dos, of course :-D
Good :) Excellent game. Looking forward to DNF? Hopefully one day ;)

> I want to refresh my programming knowledge now, So I need some advice on
> how to setup DOS properly to use it with openWatcom and write some
> graphical apps (i don't think i will ever go further 640x480x256 mode).

> Can someone recommend other DOSes?
There are many options: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_x86_DOS_operating_systems

Personally I suggest having a read through this forum, have a think about what you want to do and follow the links above to read up on each one a bit, then once you've done that I would ask questions re which is best for what.

> PS: I describe my skills like something between user and programmer, so
 You'll fit in fine. Really good to see someone new and glad to hear that you are also interested in getting involved with DOS programming again - great !

> please no too much technical abbreviations.
 Hopefully I've avoided using any.... unless you class DNF as one? :)

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