Hacker News Reader

Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

> It was a constant battle to get enough RAM for applications to run. Futzing around with himem.sys and moving around network drivers and stuff in high memory.

This was a battle even if you weren't running Windows. Many DOS programs wanted enough of that first 640K that you had to jump through hoops to fit them in.

View on HN

Rebooting 15 times with different driver ordering in the hope you'll find another 3KB of RAM to get the application to run. Really sucked if you were booting from floppy.

QEMM was a life saver in this regard.

so qemm was a configurable mapper ?

QEMM was way more aggressive in clawing out the memory blocks from all nooks and crannies, definitely was more configurable and also had a way to test different configurations of device drivers (ie CONFIG.SYS) fully automatically, so you just started it, go to eat/whatever (pray what it wouldn't lock up) and come back to the best result.

Yes, QEMM was my goto for quite a while for this. I also ran DESQView once I got a computer that could make good use of it.

I remember I'd save random mouse drivers I found on different machines at school looking for the one that used the least amount of ram. God, what a nightmare.

My course of action was to run Memmaker, and let it take care of (almost) everything. It usually worked fine. Sometimes I had to fine-tune config.sys/autoexec.bat to make a bit more room or disable EMS, but those were edge cases.

Now that I think about it, it'd be fun to know how Memmaker works internally, but I can't seem to find info on that. Maybe no one has done such analysis... yet.

> Now that I think about it, it'd be fun to know how Memmaker works internally, but I can't seem to find info on that. Maybe no one has done such analysis... yet.

It has been a long time...doesn't it just go through and LOADHIGH all the obvious possibilities? I feel like it maybe had some library of candidates it would check.

I never had this program, I think I did it all manually after analyzing config.sys and autoexec.bat on systems with more free ram than I had. It makes me realize how much knowledge I just mined from school computers.

When I was a kid I really wanted to play Ultima VII and getting that game to work right with a sound card and mouse was a game within itself for a newbie. I think it used its own proprietary memory manger just to make it harder. Eventually I was able to figure it out by making the right boot disk and config.sys, but man what a pain.

That game was amazing and I remember doing the exact same thing. Had to disable ems memory and boot the computer so that the game engines memory manager had enough to work with.

Honestly that game probably set in motion my career path in IT.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com