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From: iain@batserver.cs.uq.oz.au (Iain Fogg)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: EMS
Message-ID: <3238@moondance.cs.uq.oz.au>
Date: 12 Apr 90 02:56:56 GMT
Sender: news@moondance.cs.uq.oz.au
Reply-To: iain@batserver.cs.uq.oz.au
Lines: 44

I recently downloaded EMS40V11.ARC from SIMTEL-20. My old EMS driver was
version 3.4 and 4DOS complains a bit with that loaded. I have installed
the new driver and the 4DOS problem has disappeared, but I am a bit
confused about a couple of things. I hope someone can help.

BTW I have a 386 clone with 4M of RAM - 3M extended.

When the EMS driver is installed it displays the following message on
the screen:

	EMS 4.0 Simulator, Ver. 1.1 (C) 1989 Ziff Communications
	PC Magazine + Douglas Boling

The documentation I have says that if no parameter is given to the
driven at startup, 384K will be used as a default. This suggests to me
that if the driver is installed with no parameters, the 384K of memory
above the 640K waterline will become expanded memory. Does this make
sense - isn't the video buffer located in this part of memory? Also,
what happens when the ROM BIOS is relocated to RAM - where is it
typically relocated to. Again if its somewhere above the 640K mark, and
I've installed the EMS driver with no parameters, won't I have big
problems?

I actually install the driver with 3072 as a parameter, hoping that this
tells the driver I have 3M of extended memory. In other words, (I think)
I want to tell the driver to start expanded memory at the 1M mark and go
from there.

Any advice on the installation of EMS drivers would be most welcome, in
particular the driver I've mentioned above.

On a related point, my old version 3.4 driver is ~10K bigger that the
new version 4.0 job (i.e. length of .SYS file), but the new driver uses
~50K more low memory that the old one. I think the old driver used
memory above 640K as a frame buffer for EMS memory. I can only guess
that this new driver is using memory below 640K. Does this sound
reasonable? This is fairly concerning because 50K of low memory is quite
a slab. Again, advice/comments welcome.

Iain.

PS. If you require any more detailed information to answer my questions
please email to:
    iain@batserver.cs.uq.oz.au