to much ram in DOS? what games?

[Soviet Conscript]

i've read here and there on the forums about haveing to much ram in a computer running dos will cause errors with some games. out of curiousity does anyone have an example of games that do this? i used to run a dos pc with over 128mb ram and never encountered any issues. i just upgraded my 486 from 8 to its max of 32mb of ram which was quite a lot in the day so i'm a bit curious.

[skaar]

This might be an over 2GB memory issue, running newer boards/etc.

Don't recall that being a problem < 32MB.

[Kitsune Sniper]

Doesn't that have to do with programs that stay in the upper parts of memory or something? I remember reading something about it on a game I bought a while back. You weren't supposed to use those programs if you had a lot of RAM because they caused conflicts.

[Jorpho]

There are occasionally threads on the DOSBox support forums about games that do not work properly if "memsize" is too high. I think I can also recall some threads about games that do not expect quite so much conventional memory (i.e. below the 640kb barrier) to be available. Searching said forums is left as an exercise to the reader.

Still more common are threads about Win9x, which in theory cannot function on a machine with 512 MB of RAM or more, but the exact details get hazy.

[cynicalhat]

Win98SE will work fine with 512 megs of ram. I ran it with a gig. I do believe that file size was limited to 2 gigs.

[Dave Farquhar]

There are some DOS games that will get confused when they query available memory and see more than they were expecting. I don't think I've ever seen a comprehensive list. But 32 MB isn't likely to cause problems. That was a lot of memory in the 486's day, but not unheard of. Some 486s could take 64 MB of RAM.

As for Win98, you had to change the vcache settings in system.ini to keep from getting a weird "out of memory" error if you installed more than 512MB of RAM in it, but that was a good thing to do anyway. I typically set it to 1/4 the amount of available RAM. If you set it above 524288, you got the error.

[Drath]

Daggerfall is notorious for this; however, a lot more of the issues are caused by CPU speed being too high. RAM in Daggerfall effects many things that lead to crashes, so whether that fits your "causes errors" definition is up to you. In DOSBox, you need to use memsize to stop the majority of those crashes.

[vintagegamecrazy]

Windows 98 runs fine with over 512MB or ram. I can vouch for it too. I have a very high end Pentium II that will take a GB or ram and it runs without a hitch. It's actually quite a beautiful site to see how smooth it runs actually!