At 04:36 PM 3/13/2005 -0800, root wrote:
Yes, under every version of DOS that I'm aware of, HIMEM.SYS is an XMS driver for 286 and above.
Not true of MS-DOS 7.x. FreeDOS reports as 7.10, also.
Most people that have/had a 386+ just run EMM386 in addition to HIMEM, I'm assuming for the purpose of simulating EMS, especially because many DOS games required EMS specifically.
No, they use it often for VCPI support. It is also required for UMBs, probably the single most common reason users load EMM386.
I believe M$'s HIMEM.SYS driver simply provided an interface to the BIOS's XMS memory access functions which provided things like GDT's etc. but I don't know all the details.
No, there are no BIOS XMS memory access functions. There is minimal extended memory support, not XMS.
I found out that FreeDOS's HIMEM.EXE is for 386+ only but i'm not sure why.
The reasons are currently being discussed in freedos-user and freedos-devel. Given FDXMS286's presence, it is both completely unnecessary and unduly burdensome to the huge majority of non-286 FreeDOS users for HIMEM to back-support 286 machines.
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