Hi folks, Just came into possession of my dad's old 386 machine from years ago. Still runs fine (Acros system, 80386 processor, 6 megs of RAM, 72 meg HD, 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives, and functional keyboard =). Running MS-DOS 6.22 on it, and I was wondering how to go about freeing up some memory in the configuration files? The MS DOS 6 user's guide I found is very vague about what all the data means. Here is the output I get from MEM: Memory Type Total = Used + Free ---------------- ------- ------- ------- Conventional 640K 30K 610K Upper 147K 50K 97K Reserved 384K 384K 0K Extended (XMS) 4,973K 2,269K 2,704K ---------------- ------- ------- ------- Total memory 6,144K 2,733K 3,411K Total under 1 MB 787K 80K 707K Largest executable program size 610K (624,880 bytes) Largest free upper memory block 54K (54,944 bytes) MS-DOS is resident in the high memory area. I'm trying to free at least 3.77 megs of memory so it will let me play DOOM. ;) At the moment I've found I have enough memory if I skip the config files on startup - but when I tried remming things out in config.sys or autoexec.bat, it always made the situation worse (less memory). Here are my complete config.sys and autoexec.bat files. (By the way, the system has Win 3.1 on it but boots to DOS) AUTOEXEC.BAT @ECHO OFF PROMPT $T $P$G LH /L:1,16944 C:\DOS\SHARE.exe /L:500 /F:5100 Path C:\HDM;C:\DOS;C:\WINDOWS;C:\UTIL;C:\CPBACKUP;C: rem SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T3 rem ; SET GALAXY=A220 I5 D1 K10 P530 T6 rem SET SOUND=C:\SC400 rem LH /L:1,28032 C:\DOS\MSCDEX.exe /D:MSCD000 SET CPBACKUP=C:\CPBACKUP\DATA SET TEMP=E:\ZDIR FLIP NUM ON rem SET MOUSE=C:\MOUSE rem LH /L:0;2,24304 /S C:\MOUSE\MOUSE.exe /Q LH /L:0;1,45568 /S C:\DOS\SMARTDRV.exe C 2048 1024 doskey rem WINLOAD CD \ cls (the sound stuff is remmed out because I have no speakers for it at the moment; same for the mouse and CDROM; WINLOAD is a program that executes Win 3.1) CONFIG.SYS DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.exe NOEMS BUFFERS=10,0 FILES=40 DOS=UMB LASTDRIVE=F FCBS=16,0 rem DEVICEHIGH /L:1,38208 =C:\SC400\DRIVERS\SLCD.SYS /D:MSCD000 /B:634 DEVICEHIGH /L:2,12048 =C:\DOS\SETVER.exe DEVICEHIGH /L:2,9072 =C:\DOS\ANSI.SYS DOS=HIGH STACKS=9,256 SHELL=C:\COMMAND.COM C:\ /e:2028 /p Now, I'm by no means a DOS newbie, but I've never understood Config.sys fully. Any help would be much appreciated! =) Kasreyn

Oops, I should mention: Drive is partitioned, C is DOS, Win, and utilities, D is swap, E is games and fun stuff. B is the nonfunctional 5.25" floppy drive and F is CDROM. =P Kasreyn

Your problem is no EMS memory: DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.exe NOEMS Try changing NOEMS to I=B000-B7FF RAM HIGHSCAN The I=B000-B7FF includes an area of high memory not used by your video adaptor. If this gives you EMS but leaves insufficient low (conventional) memory, reply back here. I've spent many long and happy hours squeezing every bit out of DOS memory!

hello man! you have just to run MEMMAKER! best wishes!

Another option is to obtain IBM's PC-DOS version 7. This version of Dos allows for moving more of the operating system into upper memory with additional commands in the config.sys Example below: device=c:\dos\himem.sys device=c:\dos\emm386.exe noems /i=b000-b7ff dos=high,umb dosdata=umb files=40 lastdrive=f The command "dosdata=umb" moves more of the O/S into upper memory along with "dos=high,umb" Hope this helps Wardy

Kasreyn, You simply need to rem out MOST of your config & autoexec lines most of them ar'nt required to run DOOM. The last thing you want to do is enable EMS!! ALL you need in config.sys is: DEVICE=C:\DOS\HIMEM.SYS DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.exe NOEMS FILES=40 DOS=UMB DOS=HIGH Rem the other lines out they just use up memory that DOOM would use... And for Autoexec.bat : @ECHO OFF PROMPT $T $P$G cls again rem out the rest... You should find that this works just fine, except for the fact that Doom will run mighty slow on a 386!! James

How much memory does DOOM require? You had 610K of conventional memory free. Do you need the cd rom to play doom. You could rem out the mscdex.exe entry in the autoexec.bat just for playing doom. You could boot from a floppy disk or achieve the same thing by renaming config.sys config.bak and autoexec.bat autoexec.bak to play doom and then reboot. I had a Geography program like that--but I did not have 610k free. I finally chose a boot disk with no configuration files on it that I used to boot when I wanted to run that program.