At 10:58 PM 10/6/2005 +0200, Bernd Blaauw wrote:
as for the nature of the XMS driver, to my surprise FDXMS286 *can* be
loaded by DEVLOAD, a commandline loader.
So, it's runtime loadable (no idea if it would also crash on 8086) and
supports 80286 platform
Huge drawback to that is that it's not as advanced as your driver. (A20
styles, 4GB support, XMS3.0 API, options, etc..)
so that means Microsoft's XMSMMGR.EXE can be imitated :)
We've discussed loading HIMEM at the DOS prompt after CONFIG.SYS processing
before, too. It's a bad idea that could easily open the floodgates of bug
reports for people wondering why their drivers aren't loading or working
properly, and why XMS/EMS memory or HMA/UMBs are missing or
misbehaving. I don't want any part of it, even though the actual code
changes necessarily for basic setup would likely be small relative to
what's already been done to it.
Note that XMSMMGR is rarely mentioned by Microsoft and has a microscopic
fraction of references anywhere compared to HIMEM. That condition is quite
pertinent to this discussion. XMSMMGR appears to be a stripped-down hack
program forced into creation so Windows could be installed even when HIMEM
was not loaded, and not intended for general DOS use.
As far as EMM386, I am not sure one could ever reliably load EMM386 at the
command prompt post CONFIG.SYS drivers and COMMAND shell, plus a scattering
of AUTOEXEC TSRs. I am sure I don't want to try.
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