It is amazing to see that there is still interest in the old and obsolete operating system of MS-DOS. However because the intel 8088 and 8086 could only address directly one megabyte of memory and had only read mode operation, this operating system was written for this specific hardware. The fact that later intel CPUs maintained full backwards compatibility with the intel 8088 and intel 8086 allowed this operating system to continue for a long time.
A nice video and i remember using those memory managers back in the late 80s and early 90s. They really were needed and was a real juggling act. Im interested in more of this series.
Back then, I created boot disks for my non-technology-savvy friends to play games. precisely tailored with the necessary drivers and boot menus. That was the really hot stuff.
Thank you. Some memories from the sewer of brain came flooding back. Interestingly I loved Amiga but was less tolerant of its 1MB limits than I was with DOS. Was so much more happier to play with commands and smaller drivers...... got my first DOS virus doing this 😁
PC DOS 2000 was Y2K safe / compliant. That, in my mind, is the best DOS with built-in memory manager. That has an impressive conventional memory reclamation achievement. I switched over to DR DOS at v5 (so MS DOS 3.3 straight to DR DOS v5.) Stayed with it through Novell DOS 7. Then I switched to OS/2 in 1992, so largely the DOS tools beyond 1992 I never had to deal with.
Great video! Reminded from the time when the struggle of finding enough conventional memory to run some games. I recall QEMM being the best choice while eventually with DOS 6.xx and its memmaker things started to get easier, right before jumping to Win95 world and leaving the whole challenge to the past.
My first own pc in the late 80s was a 286 IBM clone with 1M Ram, a 3.5in floppy drive and 40 megs harddisk. It came with MS-DOS 4. And that meant: it was a constant struggle against low memory after boot. Since Himem and EMM386 weren't applicable here. So I was happy when I got 500k conventional ram available. After I got a copy of Win 3.0 I was not able to load it or parts of it in upper memory. So it ate lots of the lower memory. I could run Minesweeper or Solitaire but had to leave Windows altogether to get something useful done.
Qmm386 was great i recall running it for a while but i also remember having some issues with it that didn't exist with stock himem and emm386. Glad those days are gone. However i am amazed how bloated modern software had gotten. Things just burn lots of memory. At work we have software that uses 30MB normally but it can use over 1GB. That's insane compared to the 90s. Every k counted with MSDOS as you show.
I tend to make fun and jokes about nVidia graphics drivers being as large as 500 MiB in download, as much as Windows XP waswhen installed to the hard drive!
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Most of that weight isn't even the drivers themselves, but the bloatware called Nvidia Desktop Manager (a .net program which means bloat) and other stuff. Debloating drivers with only the basic DirectX and OpenGL stack DLLs sums like 30MBs, more or less, and from that weight, the most goes to the DirectX and OpenGL DLLs. The CUDA and Video Codec DLLs amount like 25 or MBs more. This gives you a 60MB driver. The rest is bloat.
I had one qemm boot option that had around 740k base memory reporting! Monochrome reclaim. Dos high. Everything in umb or HMA that could be. Even a compact non ms cd driver for SCSI cd off soundcard. That was great for doom, cd cd playback while stomping dæmons!
Great video! Can't wait for part 2. One thing to mention: CuteMouse from FreeDOS sometimes will not like resolution switching. When playing a DOS game that changes the resolution like Down Under Dan, I found that the game would switch the resolution to a slightly higher resolution (maybe 640x480 vs 720x400?). CuteMouse would have issues allowing me to click "Play" or "Load" at the bottom of the screen, since it didn't get the memo that the resolution had changed. Using Microsoft's Mouse Driver (9.x I think) worked flawlessly. I used XHDD2 or XDVD2 for HDD/Optical drivers but I think one of those drivers didn't play nice with my Athlon 550Mhz machine with DOS 7 (the Chinese DOS Union version) and corrupted the disk. Under 6.22 I think it worked flawlessly, although a replacement HIMEM driver didn't (and caused crashes).
Indeed, there's sometimes some level of incompatibility , which still may require the original drivers here and there. At least with DOS 6 onwards, custom boot menus can help to mitigate this compromise between a general purpose config, and maybe a very specific one for just one particular application or game.
I also made a custom floppy with minimal dos, w/dos networking, compressed Arachne that would load into Ramdisk.....I basically took the windiows 98 boot disk w/ramdisk and made it my own.
Nice video, looking forward to part 2! Something worth mentioning is speed. My impression is that running pure DOS applications on say a Pentium 75MHz or so can feel more sluggish with EMM386 loaded than without. P.S. I think I've mentioned Deskview/X in the comments before. Hoping you will do a video about that! Re the size of the CD-ROM driver: Drivers from manufacturers contain DRM junk that uses the drive as a dongle for the driver. Don't know how much space that eats up, I would hope it's only used while loading/initializing and freed up later, but still. I'm not skilled enough at x86/DOS debugging, but I bet that it would be possible to make one brands driver work with another brands drive by just patching the DRM part. Or when you use 86box or similar you could probably just change the text string in the emulated drive to be some other vendors to make the other vendors driver load. I hadn't heard of the driver you used or the other one mentioned here. I remember though the happiness of discovering cpqidecd . sys from Compaq which was a DRM free IDE CD driver that would just work with any IDE CD/DVD drive. Always used that rather than some vendor specific driver.
Very nice video. When I bought my first PC I had the choice between MS-DOS 4.0 and DR-DOS 5 and I went with DR-DOS because it could use high memory and MS-DOS 4 could not. Of course it was manual but for me good enough. When watching this I also remember using hard disk compression because as a teenager I was always short on money and hard disks were expensive. Maybe that also would be an interesting topic for the channel.
My dad and I used QEMM those times long ago. I was not very fond of because it broke some of my games. However the productivity programs from my dad all worked. We used QEMM 7 or 8, dont remember.
This was good, I never got to try QEMM at the time. It would be great to see a comparison of the different tech that lets you share drives with DOS, expecially re: memory usage; from SMB1, through Netware and others.
QEMM 7 was pretty awesome with newer DOSs. (I used it with PC DOS 6/7 to run multiple nodes under Desqview for a BBS. 4 different computers, 2-3 nodes each). What version of QEMM 7 did you run exactly? just curious.
@GigAHerZ64 I'm sorry, I didn't find the source anymore. I seem to have this one in my collection since at least 2013. I've upped it, amongst other drivers, to archive.org at archive.org/details/doscdrom Have fun inspecting it.
The CD-ROM driver from PTS-DOS (PTSATAPI) is not compatible with every drive but it only uses half the ram than VIDE-CDD. I'm also not sure about its compatibility with video games, but it may still be a last resort for accessing a CD on systems with a very small amount of RAM. It was included with "Acronis OS Selector SE" which is available at the Internet Archive, inside the floppy image that can be opened with 7zip or Winimage there's a file called install exe which is a self extracting zip archive and can be opened with 7zip or Winrar It was also available with earlier versions of Acronis OS Selector but it's harder to extract from the setup files. And of course it's included with PTS-DOS 2000 but again difficult to extract unless you install the whole thing on a (virtual) computer.
I have a feeling that Bill Gates has actually said something like that but in an informal gathering with friends or as a casual answer to someone complaining about the limitations of 8088 or IBM PC and didn't think that it will be taken literally later, and of course he was aware of the future and how would it look like.
I had put some links about finding that quote's origin, and apparently, there seems to be no proof, where it's originating. I tend to agree, either he uttered something, and it was taken out of context, or someone else actually said, and it was wrongly attributed. quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/08/640k-enough/ has the best summary IMO.
I still feel confused when talking about upper and lower memory. Cause Upper memory is from 0 to 240K and lower is from 256K to 624K. I always feel 0 should be lower and 624 should be upper.
I didn't really understand all of this back in the day, and even today, the more i learn, i have a feeling, the less i understand. Unfortunately without EMS you won't be running The Incredible Machine 2. Which means you might as well throw away the computer, it's pointless now. I did try QEMM back then because it freed up SO MUCH MEMORY but it also made a few things prone to crashes or locking up i forget.
my record was 621 free after mouse, mscdex, emm, smartdrv, i used some custom versions of emm386 that even allowed me to use hard disk space as ram as far as the program knew, my 4866 sx 25 had 4mb ram. Magic carpet really needed a dx33 or more but i just wanted to say could run it on my machine, so adding an additional 4mb of hard disk ram for the 8 nessasary, the game loaded and ran at
@@jbinary82 I don't think it was but this is 35 years old memories, I remember having qemm and emm.... I don't remember it being qemm but I am lazy and just wanted someone to do the dirty work and just tell me....:P Ill look into qemm see if that was it!
DOS was a child of it‘s time… And it inherited quiet some legacy being a CP/M clone. Studying the history around, it was good enough in the beginning. I think nobody expected it to be around for such a long time, making it‘s shortcomings even more evident in the long run.
Good old times. From DOS 2.11 to 6. DATEV software, Novell server, large number of open files. The problem was the 32 bit extender for Datev's Paradox database. There were two options, a system house --> expensive. Or a long night. 🥱😀 The long night was better. As described, some things were not needed, for others there were good replacements. I have two software solutions in mind in addition to the video. The keyboard driver for GR and 4DOS. 4DOS was the best command interpreter at the time with 256 bytes in conventional memory. Lastdrive was limited to H:. In addition, driver software to access the AVM B1 card in a dedicated dial-up server. 615/617 k was the goal, to run the DATEV Paradox env without problems.
It is amazing to see that there is still interest in the old and obsolete operating system of MS-DOS. However because the intel 8088 and 8086 could only address directly one megabyte of memory and had only read mode operation, this operating system was written for this specific hardware. The fact that later intel CPUs maintained full backwards compatibility with the intel 8088 and intel 8086 allowed this operating system to continue for a long time.
Whenever I build a DOS machine, I'll definitely go back to this!
A nice video and i remember using those memory managers back in the late 80s and early 90s. They really were needed and was a real juggling act. Im interested in more of this series.
I had a bunch of boot disks for different application starts, or I just renamed the config and autoexec with batch file processing.
An interesting video, as always. Can't wait for part 2!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Back then, I created boot disks for my non-technology-savvy friends to play games. precisely tailored with the necessary drivers and boot menus.
That was the really hot stuff.
Thank you. Some memories from the sewer of brain came flooding back. Interestingly I loved Amiga but was less tolerant of its 1MB limits than I was with DOS. Was so much more happier to play with commands and smaller drivers...... got my first DOS virus doing this 😁
PC DOS 2000 was Y2K safe / compliant. That, in my mind, is the best DOS with built-in memory manager. That has an impressive conventional memory reclamation achievement. I switched over to DR DOS at v5 (so MS DOS 3.3 straight to DR DOS v5.) Stayed with it through Novell DOS 7. Then I switched to OS/2 in 1992, so largely the DOS tools beyond 1992 I never had to deal with.
Nice nostalgia and practical applications with memory management, thanks for sharing. Thought the Mr know it all twist in the video was clever.
@@8randomprettysecret8 thx, glad you liked it! ^^
Good video. I optimized MS-DOS 7.1 and got good results.
Great video! Reminded from the time when the struggle of finding enough conventional memory to run some games. I recall QEMM being the best choice while eventually with DOS 6.xx and its memmaker things started to get easier, right before jumping to Win95 world and leaving the whole challenge to the past.
Fascinating on the 800+KB conventional. I knew about the 704K trick - but that sounds impressive.. looking forward to your next video!
My first own pc in the late 80s was a 286 IBM clone with 1M Ram, a 3.5in floppy drive and 40 megs harddisk. It came with MS-DOS 4. And that meant: it was a constant struggle against low memory after boot. Since Himem and EMM386 weren't applicable here. So I was happy when I got 500k conventional ram available. After I got a copy of Win 3.0 I was not able to load it or parts of it in upper memory. So it ate lots of the lower memory. I could run Minesweeper or Solitaire but had to leave Windows altogether to get something useful done.
13:45 QEMM and DESQview were the best back in the day!
I remember using HIMEM.SYS 6:39 and EMM386.EXE memory management in the CONFIG.SYS file
Qmm386 was great i recall running it for a while but i also remember having some issues with it that didn't exist with stock himem and emm386. Glad those days are gone. However i am amazed how bloated modern software had gotten. Things just burn lots of memory. At work we have software that uses 30MB normally but it can use over 1GB. That's insane compared to the 90s. Every k counted with MSDOS as you show.
I tend to make fun and jokes about nVidia graphics drivers being as large as 500 MiB in download, as much as Windows XP waswhen installed to the hard drive!
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Most of that weight isn't even the drivers themselves, but the bloatware called Nvidia Desktop Manager (a .net program which means bloat) and other stuff. Debloating drivers with only the basic DirectX and OpenGL stack DLLs sums like 30MBs, more or less, and from that weight, the most goes to the DirectX and OpenGL DLLs. The CUDA and Video Codec DLLs amount like 25 or MBs more. This gives you a 60MB driver. The rest is bloat.
I had one qemm boot option that had around 740k base memory reporting! Monochrome reclaim. Dos high. Everything in umb or HMA that could be. Even a compact non ms cd driver for SCSI cd off soundcard. That was great for doom, cd cd playback while stomping dæmons!
Great video! Can't wait for part 2. One thing to mention: CuteMouse from FreeDOS sometimes will not like resolution switching.
When playing a DOS game that changes the resolution like Down Under Dan, I found that the game would switch the resolution to a slightly higher resolution (maybe 640x480 vs 720x400?). CuteMouse would have issues allowing me to click "Play" or "Load" at the bottom of the screen, since it didn't get the memo that the resolution had changed. Using Microsoft's Mouse Driver (9.x I think) worked flawlessly.
I used XHDD2 or XDVD2 for HDD/Optical drivers but I think one of those drivers didn't play nice with my Athlon 550Mhz machine with DOS 7 (the Chinese DOS Union version) and corrupted the disk. Under 6.22 I think it worked flawlessly, although a replacement HIMEM driver didn't (and caused crashes).
Indeed, there's sometimes some level of incompatibility , which still may require the original drivers here and there.
At least with DOS 6 onwards, custom boot menus can help to mitigate this compromise between a general purpose config, and maybe a very specific one for just one particular application or game.
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR speaking of menus… could I drop the idea of “how to make a custom boot menu” into your suggestion box? 😀
@@Coburn64 sure, will come anyway once I dive into the DOS network software ;)
I also made a custom floppy with minimal dos, w/dos networking, compressed Arachne that would load into Ramdisk.....I basically took the windiows 98 boot disk w/ramdisk and made it my own.
Nice video, looking forward to part 2!
Something worth mentioning is speed. My impression is that running pure DOS applications on say a Pentium 75MHz or so can feel more sluggish with EMM386 loaded than without.
P.S. I think I've mentioned Deskview/X in the comments before. Hoping you will do a video about that!
Re the size of the CD-ROM driver: Drivers from manufacturers contain DRM junk that uses the drive as a dongle for the driver. Don't know how much space that eats up, I would hope it's only used while loading/initializing and freed up later, but still.
I'm not skilled enough at x86/DOS debugging, but I bet that it would be possible to make one brands driver work with another brands drive by just patching the DRM part. Or when you use 86box or similar you could probably just change the text string in the emulated drive to be some other vendors to make the other vendors driver load.
I hadn't heard of the driver you used or the other one mentioned here. I remember though the happiness of discovering cpqidecd . sys from Compaq which was a DRM free IDE CD driver that would just work with any IDE CD/DVD drive. Always used that rather than some vendor specific driver.
Very nice video. When I bought my first PC I had the choice between MS-DOS 4.0 and DR-DOS 5 and I went with DR-DOS because it could use high memory and MS-DOS 4 could not. Of course it was manual but for me good enough.
When watching this I also remember using hard disk compression because as a teenager I was always short on money and hard disks were expensive. Maybe that also would be an interesting topic for the channel.
Thanks! And indeed, I remember using disk compression as well. Will definitely look into this at some point.
My dad and I used QEMM those times long ago. I was not very fond of because it broke some of my games. However the productivity programs from my dad all worked. We used QEMM 7 or 8, dont remember.
This was good, I never got to try QEMM at the time. It would be great to see a comparison of the different tech that lets you share drives with DOS, expecially re: memory usage; from SMB1, through Netware and others.
@@stuaxo Of course, I‘ll touch that comparison aspect in the upcoming episodes, when looking into the actual network products.
I had that boot loop with ramboost - it took a bit or googling to get out of that loop ;)
@@the_kombinator y2k bug ^^
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Yeah I never would have realized it was a date issue.
QEMM 7 was pretty awesome with newer DOSs. (I used it with PC DOS 6/7 to run multiple nodes under Desqview for a BBS. 4 different computers, 2-3 nodes each). What version of QEMM 7 did you run exactly? just curious.
Where did you get the smallide.sys? I would like to investigate it. :) (Couldn't identify it from any of the links from description)
@@GigAHerZ64 I‘ll check my bookmarks and will let you know!
@GigAHerZ64 I'm sorry, I didn't find the source anymore. I seem to have this one in my collection since at least 2013.
I've upped it, amongst other drivers, to archive.org at archive.org/details/doscdrom
Have fun inspecting it.
The CD-ROM driver from PTS-DOS (PTSATAPI) is not compatible with every drive but it only uses half the ram than VIDE-CDD. I'm also not sure about its compatibility with video games, but it may still be a last resort for accessing a CD on systems with a very small amount of RAM.
It was included with "Acronis OS Selector SE" which is available at the Internet Archive, inside the floppy image that can be opened with 7zip or Winimage there's a file called install exe which is a self extracting zip archive and can be opened with 7zip or Winrar
It was also available with earlier versions of Acronis OS Selector but it's harder to extract from the setup files.
And of course it's included with PTS-DOS 2000 but again difficult to extract unless you install the whole thing on a (virtual) computer.
@@ruben_balea Nice, even smaller than VIDE-CDD. It‘s crazy how small things can go.
Need to give it a shot, I have a copy of PTS-DOS.
I have a feeling that Bill Gates has actually said something like that but in an informal gathering with friends or as a casual answer to someone complaining about the limitations of 8088 or IBM PC and didn't think that it will be taken literally later, and of course he was aware of the future and how would it look like.
I had put some links about finding that quote's origin, and apparently, there seems to be no proof, where it's originating.
I tend to agree, either he uttered something, and it was taken out of context,
or someone else actually said, and it was wrongly attributed.
quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/08/640k-enough/
has the best summary IMO.
I still feel confused when talking about upper and lower memory. Cause Upper memory is from 0 to 240K and lower is from 256K to 624K.
I always feel 0 should be lower and 624 should be upper.
I didn't really understand all of this back in the day, and even today, the more i learn, i have a feeling, the less i understand.
Unfortunately without EMS you won't be running The Incredible Machine 2. Which means you might as well throw away the computer, it's pointless now.
I did try QEMM back then because it freed up SO MUCH MEMORY but it also made a few things prone to crashes or locking up i forget.
my record was 621 free after mouse, mscdex, emm, smartdrv, i used some custom versions of emm386 that even allowed me to use hard disk space as ram as far as the program knew, my 4866 sx 25 had 4mb ram. Magic carpet really needed a dx33 or more but i just wanted to say could run it on my machine, so adding an additional 4mb of hard disk ram for the 8 nessasary, the game loaded and ran at
Probably qemm386, isnt it?
@@jbinary82 I don't think it was but this is 35 years old memories, I remember having qemm and emm.... I don't remember it being qemm but I am lazy and just wanted someone to do the dirty work and just tell me....:P Ill look into qemm see if that was it!
Oh wow, so memory was an issue in very old system huh???
I thought 32bit and 64bit already a problem for OS
FREDOS
Ah yes, but MS DOS sucks… 😂
Unix FTW
DOS was a child of it‘s time…
And it inherited quiet some legacy being a CP/M clone.
Studying the history around, it was good enough in the beginning. I think nobody expected it to be around for such a long time, making it‘s shortcomings even more evident in the long run.
Good old times. From DOS 2.11 to 6.
DATEV software, Novell server, large number of open files. The problem was the 32 bit extender for Datev's Paradox database. There were two options, a system house --> expensive. Or a long night. 🥱😀 The long night was better. As described, some things were not needed, for others there were good replacements.
I have two software solutions in mind in addition to the video. The keyboard driver for GR and 4DOS. 4DOS was the best command interpreter at the time with 256 bytes in conventional memory.
Lastdrive was limited to H:.
In addition, driver software to access the AVM B1 card in a dedicated dial-up server.
615/617 k was the goal, to run the DATEV Paradox env without problems.