G550 DOS Box problem on 98

[Derek]

I have a system with a G550 Dual Head card, Epox 8KHA+ Motherboard, Athlon 1700+, 768 DDR Ram, Windows 98SE.

I use a sheet metal drawing CAD program called Fabricam, that runs in a DOS window within 98.

After installing the G550 Drivers, EMS (extended memory) is no longer available to the DOS program, in fact EMS is disabled when you look at the Windows 98 PIF editor for the program.

If I ghost back an old image of the operating system without any Matrox Driver, everything works OK, except obviously the G550 is running on a plain vanilla VGA driver making it a waste of money

I suspect the Matrox drivers are utilising the Memory space required for the EMS DOS programs, is there a way around this?

[Chrono_Wanderer]

Just to point out one thing... Windows 98 is not going to make good use of 768MB of RAMs...

[Derek]

I'm well aware of that, but that has no bearing on the problem I am posting. I don't care if the box ends up with 128, 256, 512 or whatever of ram ......

All I wan't to do is make this box work for what its built for.....to draw CAD drawings in a windows 98 DOS box on dual monitors.

And don't bother suggesting XP, it won't run the DOS program; period.

[High_Jumbllama]

Check for disabled lines in your config.sys. Perhaps the G550 install disabled something.

[Derek]

There is nothing in the config.sys, nor autoexec.

[WyWyWyWy]

Gfx card drivers using EMS?

Anyway, try to post of the official Tech Support forum.
I, like many others, don't have much experience with running DOS program in Win98 (not many do), and don't even have Win98 to test...
But the official guys would likely be willing to test it for ya.

[kjliew]

Derek,

EMS is Expanded Memory, not Extended Memory. It's an old memory interface standard which is mostly used by DOS games. EMS service is provided by DOS EMM386.EXE device driver. EMM386 also requires HIMEM.SYS to be loaded first.

Win98 DOS Box can also provide EMS service without EMM386. Check SYSTEM.INI for :
[386Enh]
EMMPageFrame=[page frame address] can be C800h, D000h etc.

To enable EMS on Win98 DOS Box, you can either:
1. Use EMM386.EXE. EMS is available on both Win98 DOS BOX and real DOS.
2. Use "EMMPageFrame" in [386Enh] on SYSTEM.INI. Must reserved a 64KB chunk within C800-EFFFh.

If none of these two exists, EMS will be disabled.

[ayoub_ibrahim]

hmm, with over 512Mb of ram win98 will show you out of memory errors.
not sure if this will apply to when you're using MS DOS though.
have you modified your Vcache entry?

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q253/9/12.asp?LN=EN-US&SD=gn&FR=0&qry=512&rnk=17&src=DHCS_MSPSS_gn_SRCH&SPR=W98SE

[Derek]

its nothing to do with over 512mb ram, same thing occurs with a 128 single stick installed

[Derek]

For anyone interested, this seems to fix it

Config.sys:
DOS=HIGH,UMB
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE 4096 RAM

[Jon P. Inghram]

I wish that myth about the 512 limit on Win98 would go away. I ran a Win98 box with 768 megs for a long time, and had no problems as long as you kept the file cache to a reasonable size. I used to play Everquest, and when using the new models (which I never did except when testing) needed more than a full gig of memory. Win98 allocated the memory correctly, using every last drop of RAM and then the swapfile.

[The PIT]

Originally posted by Jon P. Inghram
I wish that myth about the 512 limit on Win98 would go away. I ran a Win98 box with 768 megs for a long time, and had no problems as long as you kept the file cache to a reasonable size. I used to play Everquest, and when using the new models (which I never did except when testing) needed more than a full gig of memory. Win98 allocated the memory correctly, using every last drop of RAM and then the swapfile.

Well it would help if Microshaft gave you sensible numbers to play with. I had 768mb with Windoze ME. It wouldn't even boot and I couldn't remember the fix. Anyway I found a link to a microshaft page that said set you vcache to 524288. Windoze ME booted but struggled badly. Dropping it down to 65536 made one hell of a differance.