On Sunday, January 10, 2021 10:48 AM, Eric Auer e.a...@jpberlin.de wrote:
> Hi Mercury & everybody,
>
>> I noticed a while back that Japheth updated his HiMemX driver, and I've
>> finally gotten around to packaging it up for use in FreeDOS. Also, he's made
>> a new driver which can do what that HiMemX does, and more... way more.
>> HiMemSX can access memory above the 4 GiB mark! I've packaged it up also, in
>> case anyone (Jerome?) wants to include it in the next release or mirror it
>> somewhere other than my site. Both packaged drivers can be found in [the DOS
>> Downloads area at
>> mercurycoding.com](http://mercurycoding.com/downloads.html#DOS).
>
> That implements a proposed XMS 3.5 interface to support 4 TB instead of 4 GB
> of RAM, as far as I remember, with a modified version of Jack's ramdisk as
> proof of concept example for what to do with so much memory. You will
> probably be ready to keep
> updating that package from time to time while initial glitches get fixed,
Yep, he's released three versions already - I foresee a very active project. :)
> but it is a good idea to already offer this as an optional (!) package to
> motivate others to update drivers and apps to use the new possibilities :-)
My thoughts exactly! It's not like any of us feasibly need more than 4 GiB
right now, but the more people who use it on a daily basis mean more bug
reports which mean a more polished product.
> Compared to multithreading and 64-bit long mode projects, XMS 3.5 is very
> close to normal DOS style, so making apps use it should work smoothly. I just
> fail to find examples for stuff which would need so much RAM.
> ...
Agreed, but I wonder if it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem; do we have no
big-time apps on DOS because DOS can't handle them or does DOS not handle them
because the big-time apps don't exist? lol
My point is that, perhaps if some of the underlying limitations of DOS are
removed, we may see more modern apps breaths life into the aging platform.
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