Hello Eric, hello Paul,
I think we don't see things the same way on that point.
I believe my BIOS is not very special (AMIBIOS), just relatively recent.
So I believe others are likely to encounter reserved memory in the
memory area DOS normally use.
You are the first person who has reported a reserved area below
640 kB that I remember at all, so it does feel quite unusual.
Of course the BIOS brand is not special, but taking care of needs
of DOS and DOS apps has gone down a lot relatively recently only.
FreeDOS (and other MS-DOS compatibles) will ask the BIOS --- via int
0x12, or [0:0x413] --- how much memory is available, rather than always
assuming 640 KiB.
Really, why should a legacy OS have to somehow divine that a memory area
that the BIOS has already reported as "available" is actually "not
available"? This has never been a thing in the past.
If 0x5800:0 is "unavailable" but the BIOS says it is "available", then
there is a problem somewhere, and it is not in FreeDOS. I can think of
some possibilities:
(1) the CMOS settings are out of whack;
(2) some RAM chips have gone bad; or
(3) the BIOS is buggy.
Thank you!
--
https://gitlab.com/tkchia :: https://github.com/tkchia
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