dos windows problems

[Six Eyed Smily]

i have a 160meg exe that runs in a dos window. sadly, when i run it, it tells me the program is too big to fit in memory.

went into the properties of the program, and upped the memory allocation, unfortunately it wont up enough.

i would imagine this program would run fine under windows 98, as the memory allocation shouldnt be a problem, but is there a way to allow very large dos programs in win xp?

[NooNoo]

Six, When a DOS program says it won't fit in memory, it is not talking about the 160 mb... its talking about the base memory, that first 640kb.

XP has probably loaded a bunch of drivers in the base memory (such as the cd, sound, mouse etc) and left no room for your program. I have a couple that MUST be run from boot disk as a standard autoexec.bat takes up too much room.

[confus-ed]

To see how much 'conventinal' memory is available simply type 'mem' at a prompt ;)

Your DOS app probably wants 'extended' memory - that beyond 1024 or maybe 'expanded' memory that between 640-1024k ... it deliberatley isn't configured in xp 'pretend' DOS - you can do it, but its mighty confus-ing ! You need to load Himem.sys & emm386 but this confuses the sh*t outa xp !!! (you need to make sure it leaves space for an 'extended/expanded' DOS session)

As Noo points out its nothing to do with disk space ...

[Six Eyed Smily]

ahhh - now i rember why win 2k was so good - dos really is a pain in the arse.

ok thanks.

confused, have you got a link for how to get xp to load himem and emm386?

[confus-ed]

Have a look at these two links ...

Running DOS games on Windows XP and 2K (http://www.freelists.org/archives/adeel420/12-2002/msg00024.html)

Memory management purgatory (http://www.cgonline.com/features/020226-f1-f1-pg2.html)

Hopefully there's enough there for you to figure it out ;)

Remember the main elements of confus-ion here, are that autoexec.bat & config.sys for DOS are confus-ing-ly called autoexec.nt & config.nt & there are two copies ! Make sure you tweak the right ones ... also watch out for non Joilet filenames (or whatever the hell they are called - ones that have more than the 11 chars DOS can correctly see 8 before the '.' & 3 after)

The final consideration is partitions & file systems, & this is where xp goes off the scale in screweyness, bizarely apps running in a pretend DOS box 'need' (I dunno about for 'sure' - but they seem to 'behave better') when run from partitions that would conform to FAT16 limitations, i.e. less than 2 gig, also beware running DOS apps that need to write files from NTFS partitions - all holy hell can break loose & even result in your supposedly safe NTFS install getting hosed.

After all of that - generally I dual boot !