Відео

Nice nostalgia and practical applications with memory management, thanks for sharing. Thought the Mr know it all twist in the video was clever.

13:45 QEMM and DESQview were the best back in the day!

Helix Netroom is a bit different from 386MAX and QEMM, by the fact it "cloaks" not only a set of the most used drivers in DOS by offering its own version of them, but also "cloaks" the system BIOS (yes, it replaces part of the BIOS services by its own "cloaked" versions, hence the "Award Software Inc." copyright notices in Netroom program's banner). And this so called "cloaking enabled" was just a DPMS version of the drivers, TSRs and BIOS made by Helix, or ported by their own vendors with the help of some DDK which Helix used to sell. Novell, Logitech and Adaptec had "cloaked" versions of their network redirector, mouse driver, and SCSI ASPI stack. Cloaked drivers don't use EMS or UMBs, but run as protected mode modules outside the 1MB memory limit. This means if you used Netroom in conjunction with "cloaked" versions of the system BIOS, drivers and TSRs, and you enabled certain parameters in the RM386 EMM driver, you could get more than 640k of free memory for DOS programs plus all your UMBs almost intact to load non cloacked drivers there... But for this to work, every part of the core stack had to be "cloaked", and unfortunately not every program was cooperative. Programs and many BIOSes enabling Bus Mastering didn't liked this "cloaking" tech so much. System BIOS cloaking doesn't work in PCI BIOSes. Also, Windows 95 OSR with WDM/USB enabled or Windows 98 aren't compatible with this. In this case, Netroom was less performant than 386MAX or QEMM.

Back then, I created boot disks for my non-technology-savvy friends to play games. precisely tailored with the necessary drivers and boot menus. That was the really hot stuff.

qemm is really good. I use qemm97 on my dos/win9x systems to this day

I learned early on that QEMM was the best, so I used it from 1991 onwards and never looked back. I appreciate checking out all of the alternatives (netroom, 386max, etc.), now I get to see how they operated. Thanks!

I also made a custom floppy with minimal dos, w/dos networking, compressed Arachne that would load into Ramdisk.....I basically took the windiows 98 boot disk w/ramdisk and made it my own.

my record was 621 free after mouse, mscdex, emm, smartdrv, i used some custom versions of emm386 that even allowed me to use hard disk space as ram as far as the program knew, my 4866 sx 25 had 4mb ram. Magic carpet really needed a dx33 or more but i just wanted to say could run it on my machine, so adding an additional 4mb of hard disk ram for the 8 nessasary, the game loaded and ran at <1fps, but it ran while thrashing my hard disk. If anyone knows what the emm386 varient was I would love to find it.

Great video! Reminded from the time when the struggle of finding enough conventional memory to run some games. I recall QEMM being the best choice while eventually with DOS 6.xx and its memmaker things started to get easier, right before jumping to Win95 world and leaving the whole challenge to the past.

My first own pc in the late 80s was a 286 IBM clone with 1M Ram, a 3.5in floppy drive and 40 megs harddisk. It came with MS-DOS 4. And that meant: it was a constant struggle against low memory after boot. Since Himem and EMM386 weren't applicable here. So I was happy when I got 500k conventional ram available. After I got a copy of Win 3.0 I was not able to load it or parts of it in upper memory. So it ate lots of the lower memory. I could run Minesweeper or Solitaire but had to leave Windows altogether to get something useful done.

I remember using HIMEM.SYS 6:39 and EMM386.EXE memory management in the CONFIG.SYS file

I have a feeling that Bill Gates has actually said something like that but in an informal gathering with friends or as a casual answer to someone complaining about the limitations of 8088 or IBM PC and didn't think that it will be taken literally later, and of course he was aware of the future and how would it look like.

This memory management nonsense really stayed relevant well into the late 90s and early 2000s if you were the type of person to play old (but not ridiculously old - we're talking ~5 years old) DOS games. Usually it wasn't a _huge_ problem because the games of this era, even if DOS-based, ran in protected mode and could use XMS for most things, thus having minimal conventional memory requirements. But they still required some conventional memory, and some more than others. One of my favorite childhood games was Star Wars: TIE Fighter, which just wouldn't run in Win9x's DOS window for me for whatever reason. It wouldn't work in the default "MS-DOS mode" configuration either due to lack of conventional memory. I needed a mouse driver and legacy Sound Blaster emulation driver to play the game, so the leeway was limited 😅 AFAIR, I ended up with a special configuration that omitted the international language settings and the real-mode CD-ROM driver specifically so that the game and its dependencies would fit. Win9x actually had a special provision that you could provide a custom DOS configuration, a set of one-time CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files that would be bundled with a DOS app shortcut (a PIF file) - upon clicking on the shortcut, the computer would reboot with this one time config, run the app, and then reboot back into Windows with original configuration. But back in the DOS / Windows 3.x era, there were other tricks. DOS 6 had a boot menu feature - you could have multiple sets of CONFIG.SYS settings, selectable at boot time. People would have different configurations ready for gaming, networking, Windows or other apps with specific requirements, possibly disabling drivers that were huge but not necessary in certain applications (e.g. you don't need CD-ROM to play a game installed from floppies, and you don't need sound to run AutoCAD) - and routinely reboot between those. This concept was even carried on into Windows 9x and NT as "hardware profiles", but this feature was seldom used and has been removed from Vista onward.

Whenever I build a DOS machine, I'll definitely go back to this!

A nice video and i remember using those memory managers back in the late 80s and early 90s. They really were needed and was a real juggling act. Im interested in more of this series.

PC DOS 2000 was Y2K safe / compliant. That, in my mind, is the best DOS with built-in memory manager. That has an impressive conventional memory reclamation achievement. I switched over to DR DOS at v5 (so MS DOS 3.3 straight to DR DOS v5.) Stayed with it through Novell DOS 7. Then I switched to OS/2 in 1992, so largely the DOS tools beyond 1992 I never had to deal with.

Love it! Every time I watch one of your vids, I learn SEVERAL new things. Hadn't heard of SMALLIDE and hadn't thought of using SHSUCDX. Didn't know how much QEMM would help, and never heard of HELIX. Another very well done video!

Oh wow, so memory was an issue in very old system huh??? I thought 32bit and 64bit already a problem for OS

Qmm386 was great i recall running it for a while but i also remember having some issues with it that didn't exist with stock himem and emm386. Glad those days are gone. However i am amazed how bloated modern software had gotten. Things just burn lots of memory. At work we have software that uses 30MB normally but it can use over 1GB. That's insane compared to the 90s. Every k counted with MSDOS as you show.

Ah yes, but MS DOS sucks… 😂 Unix FTW

Very nice video. When I bought my first PC I had the choice between MS-DOS 4.0 and DR-DOS 5 and I went with DR-DOS because it could use high memory and MS-DOS 4 could not. Of course it was manual but for me good enough. When watching this I also remember using hard disk compression because as a teenager I was always short on money and hard disks were expensive. Maybe that also would be an interesting topic for the channel.

FREDOS

An interesting video, as always. Can't wait for part 2!

Zip disks/drives were awesome when they came out. I was in college and lugging around stacks of floppies, spanning files across multiple floppies which really sucked. Then Zip drives came out and I picked one up and was able to use it both with the engineering NT & Unix workstations, liberal arts departments Windows machines on campus, and at home on my own PC. It was a godsend in the mid 1990's.

Grandparents worked at DG and had at least 100 different programs in their OEM boxes for the DG One. All the software I saw was labeled for DGOne. I think that was because the laptop was not quite 100% IBM compatible (and for the new 3.5" discs). Wish we still had this stuff.

Please could you get rid of the 'Mr Know it All' overlay videos, I find them very annoying. Any facts, just pop up a box with the information.

Correct winNT IS os/2 userland base WITH VMS kernel on top system to run multiple systems like posix, win32, os2 apps all that is completely different from ibm os2 is only limited to dos and win16 to win32 in later versions

"what about Windows ME!?" That was an interesting look at the bug compared to the wiki page i've read. cheers!

This really helped me with my book 8088. Use etcher to to burn your image and then use gparted to make a FAT 16 partition. Before I tried those steps formatting didn't work.

Thanks for this deep dive. I'd love to see if the % gains that MS claim with 3.11 stack up! Especially RAM usage vs stock 3.1. People with antique computers would like to know performance vs memory usage trade-off! Thank you!

30 years later, they seem on track to repeat the same mistake

Qemu?

Do you have instructions on removing neckboard?