Basic system outline:

Windows 98 Second Edition
Pentium 4 @ 2.8ghz
2 x 256mb DDR ram

My current project has been building a Windows 98 SE machine so that I can run both 9x and DOS games in their native environment.
I know, I know, virtual machines and DOSBox. But that's no fun. It's the same reason I've got stacks of old video game consoles under a big CRT TV.

So far, the Windows side of things has been just fine.

DOS, on the other hand, has been giving me trouble.

I know next to nothing about the inner workings of DOS and have pretty much been bumbling my way through the blank autoexec.bat and config.sys provided with a clean install. Yet, through much luck and reading of tutorials, I managed to get the CD-ROM and Mouse working.

To celebrate, I popped in the CD version of Simcity 2000 for a test and fired up the installer in DOS, only to be greeted with a warning that the computer has only 1024kb installed memory, which isn't right at all. Got the same error when trying to run the DOS installer through Windows.
Tried Demolition Derby and, again, got a message about low memory. So something seems to be up.

I've been looking into XMS, EMS and all that wacky stuff, but it's making my head spin. I then found this basic config.sys layout that supposedly would work:

DEVICE=C:\Windows\HIMEM.SYS
DOS=HIGH,UMB
DEVICE=C:\Windows\EMM386.EXE NOEMS


But nothing changed.

Really not sure what I'm missing here. I half expect that I'm asking the wrong questions.

If anyone has any suggestion for leads to follow, I'd be really grateful. To run Windows 98 the way it was meant to be, yhu have to have a real hardware system the meets the typical requirements for Windows 98 or 98SE.
Using a PC that far EXCEEDS the requirements is not a good idea.
Some older programs can not deal with higher CPU speed or huge memory size. Or LARGE Hard Drive space.
The authors never envisioned that huge memory sizes were coming soon. This creates a error when it tries to find the memory size. It is called 'truncation', which is another way of saying the value is not correctly computed. It is like using a calculator that can not display the digits on the left end of the display.

One of the reasons people use emulators is to replicate a virtual environment where the old program is working in its favorite environment.
So, you need to either:
A.) get a real old system with limited CPU speed and limited memory.
OR
B.) Use a DOS Box emulator that lets you set the pentameters.

Try this - you may get some errors as it steals memory from the video card and your hardware may not allow it.
These were from MSDOS config.sys that I used but I edited the Windows folder where it was c:\dos

Code: [Select]DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS /testmem:off
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE min=0 ram auto x=c800-cbff D=48
DOS=HIGH,UMB

and if that does fail then try this

Code: [Select]DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE ram auto
DOS=HIGH,UMB
There will be the CDROM drivers and any other items that can be loaded high with the DEVICEHIGH= and LH commands , but it's a juggling exercise when you have a lot of drivers.

As an example: some drivers need more RAM to initialise themselves, and then settle into a smaller ram footprint to run - and these need to be loaded first so they don't fail saying "out of memory".
You also have different blocks of high memory and you have to force the various drivers to load in a certain order to load them all into high memory, depending on their ram usage.

That was the MSDOS days!
There was an automated memory management tool in MSDOS called Memmaker but I did it all manually, coz I was a geek.

In Win98 you won't use all those drivers and TSRs that we found useful in a plain MSDOS machine, so see how you go with the above info.

It occurs to me also that EMM386 fails to load with too much RAM. Watch the loading screens for error messages - hit the pause button and see if you can make sure that they load.

Was DOS installed standalone...and before Windows ? ?

If so Post copies of your current config.sys and autoexec files and we'll have a look.Quote from: Geek-9pm on April 04, 2014, 11:07:17 AM

To run Windows 98 the way it was meant to be, yhu have to have a real hardware system the meets the typical requirements for Windows 98 or 98SE.
Using a PC that far exceeds the requirements is not a good idea.

Try this...

Was DOS installed standalone...and before Windows ? ?

If so Post copies of your current config.sys and autoexec files and we'll have a look.

How are you running DOS, exactly? If you are using Start->Shutdown and choosing "Restart in MS-DOS Mode" Windows will not run config.sys and autoexec.bat (it will run "dosstart.bat" in C:\Windows by default).

You can change this by finding "Exit To Dos" in the Windows Folder. It is a ".PIF" file, but even when you have Win98 set to show extensions it will hide it. Right-click that file, and choose properties. Go to the "Program" tab. Choose "Advanced" at the bottom. You want to explicitly set the autoexec.bat and config.sys contents. If you don't, Restarting in MS-DOS mode effectively exits Windows to DOS; since Windows 98SE does not in fact rely on himem.sys being loaded, a standard install will not have access to Extended memory in MS-DOS mode- additionally, since it doesn't run autoexec.bat or config.sys (since it's not really restarting) it won't run those when you choose to restart in MS-DOS mode either.