Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!udel!princeton!phoenix!jwbirdsa
From: jwbirdsa@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (James Webster Birdsall)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Why is DOS limited to 640K?
Message-ID: <11142@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 28 Oct 89 22:59:51 GMT
References: <16320@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU> <5049@bgsuvax.UUCP> <757@ccssrv.UUCP>
Reply-To: jwbirdsa@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (James Webster Birdsall)
Organization: Princeton University, NJ
Lines: 22

In article <757@ccssrv.UUCP> perry@ccssrv.UUCP (Perry Hutchison) writes:
>The reason there is no program to do this with an EGA is that, in some
>display modes, the EGA's buffer space starts at the 640K boundary.  If you
>can guarantee that none of your programs will try to set EGA graphic modes,
>the CGA stuff might work.  (You can still use the higher-resolution but
>otherwise CGA-compatible text modes.)  If you actually need EGA graphics,
>you're stuck with 640K max.

   Not necessarily. A few months ago, PC Magazine had a mini-review of 
some utilities which actually use EGA video RAM to expand your DOS
conventional RAM. Of course, they would work only as long as you didn't
switch into a graphics mode -- the manufacturer was, of course, quite
emphatic about this :-) -- but since most software is text-only, they
sounded medium useful.

   No matter how weird any given idea sounds, somebody somewhere has
probably at least tried it...

-- 
James W. Birdsall  jwbirdsa@phoenix.Princeton.EDU  jwbirdsa@pucc.BITNET
   ...allegra!princeton!phoenix!jwbirdsa   Compu$erve: 71261,1731
"For it is the doom of men that they forget." -- Merlin