Quote Originally Posted by Tanooki View Post
I was an EMS/XMS ninja. I vaguely remember getting it as high as 610 I believe.
I got it as high as ~620K on one system, but then I was using replacements for HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE (UMBPCI.SYS, I think), QCDROM.SYS and SHSUCDX for CDROM support (universal-ish for ATAPI-standard CDROM drives), CTMOUSE mouse driver when needed, etc.

Also, I got damn lucky with UMB availability.

I still keep around a couple older machines that I found easy to configure (and one 80286 machine), just in case I ever feel the urge to wrangle with the headaches involved, but I'd rather just use DOSBOX instead and get back to a more civilized (Unix-alike) system. I can play MoO 1 & 2, Star Trek 25th Anniversary/Judgement Rites, etc just fine that way.

Still here are some sites listing useful tools, if you're feeling macho:
  • http://www.mdgx.com/ A metric butt*gently caress*ton of programs and tips can be found here, not just for DOS, but for Windows 3.1 through (some) Windows XP. Windows 98SE updated with the good parts (updated driver files, etc) of Windows ME, without the suck, seems to be his(?) baby, though -- including configuring the MS-DOS 7 underlying it out the wazoo.
  • http://www.hiren.info/downloads/dos-files WOAH NELLY, that's a lot of files. Only ones you'll probably need are ifshlp.sys, mem.exe, qcdrom.sys, shsucdx,exe, vide-cdd.sys (if qcdrom.sys doesn't suit your needs), and maybe duse.exe if you want to try USB devices.
  • http://www.uwe-sieber.de/util_e.html List hasn't been updated since 2005, but maybe you'll find something useful. DOSLFN, for long file names, might be useful. CTMOUSE (or CuteMouse) is very nice, but you can get a newer version on their site (http://cutemouse.sourceforge.net/).
  • http://www.freedos.org/ A free, opensource reimplementation of MS-DOS. I haven't used it in years, and had crashing issues with the main memory managers (XEMM386 mainly -- try UMBPCI instead) of the time, but that was in the 1.0 days.


I'm not even going to get into 98lite and the like -- it's hard enough to get Windows 98SE to install cleanly and correctly to begin with, let alone muddling it up. Save that experimenting for the inside of a virtual machine, trust me.