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From: huntley@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (Haydn Huntley)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.zenith
Subject: Re: SupersPort 286 memory.
Message-ID: <44088@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu>
Date: 4 May 90 20:21:09 GMT
References: <44029@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> <3909@munnari.oz.au>
Sender: root@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu
Organization: Indiana University, Bloomington IN.
Lines: 48

In article <3909@munnari.oz.au> danielce@uluru5.ecr.mu.oz (Daniel Ake CAROSONE) writes:
| I am puzzled about the memory configuration in the SupersPort 286.
| Looking at the chipset on the motherboard, I can clearly see 1Mb
| of memory chips, all connected.
| 
| In the SETUP facility of the MFM-200 monitor, the item referrring to 
| addidtional memory says "the amount of memory above 1Mb"
| 
| However, when the MFM-200 boots, it says "Total Memory: 640Kb"
| 
| All attempts to find this memory by all sorts of means has failed, I
| cannot get anything to use it, either as expanded or extended. The single
| exception is using PC-Tools Deluxe Rev 4.24, which reports that I have
| an EGA card with 256K of memory - blatantly untrue, but at least it found
| *something*. Attempts to directly read locations in that memory space yield
| mixed (usually bad) results.
| 
| I called Honeywell-Bull, who repair the machines here, and the tech was very
| helpful, saying that, as he understood it, the extra memory was being used
| to map video memory, but this could be configured out. How?
| 
| I currently run DOS 3.21, from Zenith. BIOS 3.37.
| 
| I am considering changing to run Xenix, mainly for novelty value. Has 
| anybody else tried this? I do know that the laptop won't run Microsoft
| MS-DOS, from experience it just won't boot it. It needs a modified DOS
| from Zenith. Will it run Xenix, or do I have to use my desktop instead?
| 
| Does anyone, particularly at Zenith, have any info, the more technical the 
| better? Another poster mentioned success at getting EMM to use that memory.
| 
| Thanks in advance
| danielce@ecr.mu.OZ.AU

Your Zenith may use a little bit of that extra 384K for video, but not
most of it.  If one puts a line containing "DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM.SYS" in
CONFIG.SYS, then one can use 256K of that otherwise unused memory as
EMS memory.  You may need to ask a friend or dealer to give you the
latest version of Zenith's MS-DOS to get this to work.  I'm using the
EMS 4.0 Driver, Version 3.30.14 and MS-DOS Version 3.30.

I am still hoping someone will post the correct command for getting
ZCACHE.SYS to use that 256K of EMS memory as a hard disk cache.

--Haydn
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*  Haydn Huntley    huntley@silver.ucs.indiana.edu  *
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