Hey Rugxulo! Coincidentally I've been reading older posts of yours on other threads/forums re memory management (DOS/32a) and your involvement with the "Stone Soup" dungeon crawler, amongst other things - many thanks for your encouragement, but this is not an experiment I will give up so easily, please rest assured. I really think the jury is still out on whether the modern netbooks and RAM architecture etc, while 'cheap' - will be shown to be as durable and thus sustainable as the laptops of the last technological epoch (i.e., noughties) - so I give my preference to Win95-era "reject" machines over a new box of gimmicks any day (nod to the OP). Alas no - BIOS permits boot from FDD and HDD only, though rather than your kind suggestion of Smart Boot Manager, I've used a "grubflop" image boot floppy I found on the Puppy Linux forums with great success. I think I've even used it in the past to load Willy-Billy's (?) 2006 offering, "FDOSGAME135" iso, in my early investigations of a "FreeDOS4Kids" model. I won't even contemplating again bootups from PCMCIA/PC-CARD cd-roms - will do drive transplants in future, and just silly-putty any post-install problems in such FrankenDOS setups. I've made some progress, having moved the SD card to a 40-pin adapter in a desktop with a well-appointed K7S41GX mbo and dvd burner. The FreeDOS 1.1 (SRC) install disk works *exactly* as I had hoped - automatic (re)format to FAT32, mbr re-writing, sys transfer, no GRUB required - so my little 'wish list' in my last post only highlights where the wheels came off the cart for the 430CDS. I did skip the install for WATTCP and WGET as I think some issues are outstanding on those, if I understand recent posts on FDOS1.1 installs correctly. (Wasn't just the install disk by the way - other FreeDOS images eg boot floppies, XFDisk and related apps in UBCDs 4.11, 5.17 tended to break at the same place - at "InitDisk" with flashing cursor loop.) I've yet to do the brain transplant back into the old machine, but will do so shortly as many old dos games generally complain about the lack of Soundblaster16-era hardware. Another strange quirk I've noticed in the 'new' environment is that I cannot get Ronald Blakendaal's "Access" GUI to import game menu icons as I had in the 430CDS (FreeDOS1.0 with the kernel upgrade).
So, I guess all I need spoon-feeding with now is an "Absolute Dummy's Guide to understanding modern solutions to DOS memory management" (i.e., JEMM/JEMMEX, HX, DOS4GW, DOS/32a, XMS, UMBs etc etc ) - which FreeDOS startup choice is best (1, 2 or 3) and can additional memory management parameters (e.g., full cache utilization for certain game requirements - whatever is meant by 'cache' in this instance) be co-opted within the "Access" GUI configurations for specific games. Or, whether a better workaround is provision of a new batch file to call up specific memory requirements, per game. Doing my research - but any sources that illustrate DOS memory management in a graphical form would be appreciated, if any are to hand, Cheers :) -- Andrew Robins arob...@fastmail.fm ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Master Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL, ASP.NET, C# 2012, HTML5, CSS, MVC, Windows 8 Apps, JavaScript and much more. Keep your skills current with LearnDevNow - 3,200 step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. ON SALE this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122712 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
