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Is there any hw/sw reason why memmaker is not able to change the memory configuration

Posted: Thu May 28, 2020 6:41 pm
by luishg
After the first reboot on DOS 6.22 (128 SDRAM), memmaker find some error so it cannot continue (and discard changes).

Is something we can solve vía software/configuration or it's because of the hw/memory implementation of the DE10?.


Best,

Re: Is there any hw/sw reason why memmaker is not able to change the memory configuration

Posted: Fri May 29, 2020 3:24 pm
by NightShadowPT
I also had trouble with Memmaker and decided to move onto QEMM.

That works very well, but you should not allow it to run the Shadow "something" optimization... :) (apologies but I don't remember the exact term)

Re: Is there any hw/sw reason why memmaker is not able to change the memory configuration

Posted: Fri May 29, 2020 6:28 pm
by Goingdown
This comes from memory so might be little bit off but anyway:

Real dos machine does initialize ram as zeroes... ao486 does it with ff:s... or something like this...

Now, memmaker relies this when it searches for not used upper memory blocks, and thus fails because it thinks that those memory ranges are in use already.

This is same reason why emm386 with ram (ems) option can not find valid frame window from upper memory. One must be manually defined and it then works fine.

Re: Is there any hw/sw reason why memmaker is not able to change the memory configuration

Posted: Sun May 31, 2020 11:36 am
by tRAcE
Goingdown is right, the settings for this are a bit complicated due to the non standard memory table of ao486 (if I recall correctly, there was a lengthy thread in the old atari forum).

To use all memory and be able to run memmaker you have to modify your CONFIG.SYS before. The EMM386.EXE line should read:

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DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE 32768 RAM FRAME=E000 D=256 X=A000-C7FF I=C800-EFFF
This sets all the correct frames and mem adresses for higher and upper memory blocks and enables 32MB of EMS, the maximum possible with the stock DOS6.22 EMM386. Even Memmaker now works fine, as it reads this parameters before optimizing and this non-standard memory maps were not uncommon (I look at you, HP...)

If you don't need EMS, you can use this line:

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DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE NOEMS X=A000-C7FF I=C800-EFFF
Nevertheless, I would suggest using QEMM 8.03 instead of EMM386, just be sure to set the EMM386 line as above before running the QEMM install and the installer should automatically skip the shadow optimization and find it's initial test configs a lot faster.

Re: Is there any hw/sw reason why memmaker is not able to change the memory configuration

Posted: Sun May 31, 2020 9:39 pm
by luishg
Awesome, tRAcE. Thanks Goingdown.

The EMM386 setting works perfectly.