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From: lane@cs.dal.ca (John Wright/Dr. Pat Lane)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Conflict between 386MAX and FASTOPEN? (and which EMM is best)
Keywords: EMS QEMM 386MAX DOS4 FASTOPEN
Message-ID: <1990Mar9.223031.4873@cs.dal.ca>
Date: 9 Mar 90 22:30:31 GMT
Reply-To: lane@cs.dal.ca.UUCP (John Wright/Dr. Pat Lane)
Distribution: na
Organization: Math, Stats & CS, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada
Lines: 56

I have a small problem with 386-to-the-Max, ver 4.05 running on my 386/25
with C&T Neat chipset, AMI BIOS and MS-DOS 4.01.

Since installing 386MAX, I have been getting occasional "Priveledged 
operation exception error" which brings the machine to a crashing halt 
from which it must be cold booted.

These are seemingly random, always occcuring during a disk access, 
I suspect, opens-for-read.  Since I've been recording them, the address 
given for the error has always been the same spot in FASTOPEN (CS:031B).  
It seems to happen more often when FASTOPEN is in high memory.  The code 
at that address appears to be harmless enough  (MOV DI,ES:BP, I think).

Qualitas tech support suggested I not try to make DOS4 use expanded
memory for BUFFERS= or FASTOPEN and leave off DOS4 on the 386MAX stmt
(apparently, in their opinion, MSDOS 4.01 still hasn't got it right
when it comes to expanded memory).

Well, I did that and I still get the errors.  Any ideas?

Oddly enough, I get the errors fairly frequently while another fellow
that uses the machine as much as I do *never* gets them.  About all I
can figure that we do differently is I keep the *Num Lock* off, he keeps
it on!  Figure that one!

Thanks as always for any help.


Re the debate on EMS managers:

I only have experience to speak of with 386MAX and dispite the above, I'm
impressed with it as a well designed, professionally supported and very
useful utility.  The documentation is fairly good which is always nice.

In article <29431@amdcad.AMD.COM> phil@pepsi.AMD.COM (Phil Ngai) writes:
>386Max is in my opinion superior because they can loadhi device drivers
>like Sun PC-NFS sockdrv.sys which QEMM-386 can not. I have not done
>this but people say it works.

I thought it was the other way around: I think QEMM can LOADHI device 
drivers but 386MAX (regular version) definately cannot.  However, for
$55US you can upgrade your 386MAX to "386 Professional" which does
load device drivers (they told me they expect to stop selling the 
"non Professional" version in a few months).

I wonder if either QEMM or 386PRO can "loadhi" programs installed with
INSTALL= in the CONFIG.SYS.  Would be useful for SHARE.EXE.

I guess one thing about 386 EMM's that everybody aggrees on is that the
one supplied with DOS 4.x sucks!

-- 
John Wright      //////////////////     Phone:  902-424-3805  or  902-424-6527
Post: c/o Dr Pat Lane, Biology Dept, Dalhousie U, Halifax N.S., CANADA B3H-4H8 
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