EMS fun with an L40SX!
William Walsh
Went to an auction for lots of computer equipment and I walked away with
lots of nice stuff for nothing. In the collection of stuff was another
L40SX. When I got it home, I was plesantly surprised to see that it too had
an 8MB SIMM installed.
For those not familiar with the L40, when the maximum amount of RAM is
installed (2 8MB SIMMs) the 2MB of RAM on the planar is used as EMS memory,
giving a total of 18MB of system memory. IBM provides a special driver to
use this memory on the L40 starter disk.
Naturally, I wanted to configure that memory on my own L40 from that I
already had from eBay. So after combining parts from the auction L40, I was
at maximum memory. I loaded the "MM.SYS" driver from the starter disk with
UINSTALL. Worked just fine.
That's where things took an interesting turn. When I was first tinkering
with the auction L40 and swiped parts from my first L40 to get 18MB RAM,
Windows 3.10 ran along fine with the IBM EMS driver and didn't complain,
despite IBM's warnings from UINSTALL about using the driver with Windows
3.x. After swapping parts back into the first L40 and installing the driver,
Windows for Workgroups 3.11 choked with an error about an incompatible EMS
driver.
Last night while talking with David Beem, he finally came up with the
solution: a simple addition of
IgnoreInstalledEMM=On
to the Windows SYSTEM.INI file under [386enh] solved the problem and now it
all works great.
So, if anybody loads their L40 up to max on RAM and runs into trouble with
Windows & the IBM EMS driver, that's what to do!
By the way--one last thing. With IBM's special EMS driver installed on my
L40 I can no longer use EMM386, as I expected. However, after running
memmaker on that system, EMM386 was doing something to give me almost 700K
of conventional memory. The IBM EMS driver doesn't do this. Is there any way
I can do this with the IBM driver? I'd like to have plenty of conventional
RAM available on this system...
William
Louis Ohland
Are you using PC Dos or M$ Duhs!?
David L. Beem
> Last night while talking with David Beem, he finally came up with
> the solution: a simple addition of "IgnoreInstalledEMM=On" to the
> Windows SYSTEM.INI file under [386enh] solved the problem
> and now it all works great.
work magic. Sorry to get your hopes up. You would think selecting "IBM
L40SX" from the [machine type] in setup would automatically make the change
for you.
> So, if anybody loads their L40 up to max on RAM and runs into
> trouble with Windows & the IBM EMS driver, that's what to do!
William's MSD is reporting IBM's driver is LIM 4.0 (same as EMM386),
with a copyright in 1992.
> By the way--one last thing. With IBM's special EMS driver installed
> on my L40 I can no longer use EMM386, as I expected. However,
> after running memmaker on that system, EMM386 was doing something
> to give me almost 700K of conventional memory. The IBM EMS driver
> doesn't do this. Is there any way I can do this with the IBM driver? I'd
> like to have plenty of conventional RAM available on this system...
A loss of 60Kb for a gain of 2Mb of EMS? Get constructive with your
driver sizes & loading & you can probably make most of that up. For one, the
Microsoft mouse driver is 10 times bigger than other equivalents. Pare your
DOS environment size down (I will search for a utility I wrote years ago) to
a needed minimum. There are some tricks out there that are almost as old as
you are.
Another thought is a version of PC-DOS with RAMBOOST. There might even
be some switches relating to the L40SX there. Most of the boost is getting
things loaded into the UMBs. EMM386 had to be making gains from the mono
region ("Include" switches) too. You can even use the other L40SX to
optimize conventional setting & then translate to the machine without
EMM386.
David
Da...@gilanet.com
William Walsh
William
William Walsh
Mirror operators may want to grab this updated page.
William
Edward Avis
configure it to provide EMS memory in addition to your system's main
memory. This is a cheating kind of way to get over 16 megabytes in a
286 or 386SX system. A pity that no OSes can use the extra ram apart
from DOS, and even there it's only for disk cache or ram disk. I
haven't tried it with Win3.x but I expect the IgnoreInstalledEMM=On
trick will be needed there too.
DOS's emm386.exe has two functions: provide a software emulation of
EMS on 386 machines, and load DOS drivers in upper memory. You could
load emm386.exe with the 'noems' option and it might coexist happily
with your L40SX's hardware EMS while still moving stuff above
640Kbyte. Alternatively you could try QEMM or another third-party
memory manager.
--
Ed Avis <ep...@doc.ic.ac.uk>
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