DOS applications running under Win XP

[Stepan]

Greetings to all,
I would be glad for your help with following problem.
I'm running Lotus 123 under DOS enviroment in Win XP.
I can start it correctly but when I try to open file that
is larger than 900 KB I get error message "not enough
memory". I've got 256 MB RAM installed in my notebook.
When I use mem /c I get

Total bytes available to programs (Conventional+Upper) :
679856 (663.9K)
Largest executable program size :
626880 (612.2K)
Largest available upper memory
block : 23984 ( 23.4K)

1048576 bytes total contiguous extended memory
0 bytes available contiguous extended memory
941056 bytes available XMS memory
MS-DOS resident in High Memory Area

Under Win 95 and 98, I got more than 17 MB of XMS memory.

Is there any possibility to set amount of XMS mamory
for DOS programs? I've changed settings of .pif for my
Lotus 123 program in many ways, but without succes. Maybe
the amount of memory can be set in config.nt file, but I
don't know, how to do it. Or is there another way?

Thanx for your help.
Stepan

 

[Tom Lake]

Is there any possibility to set amount of XMS mamory

for DOS programs? I've changed settings of .pif for my
Lotus 123 program in many ways, but without succes. Maybe
the amount of memory can be set in config.nt file, but I
don't know, how to do it. Or is there another way?

Some BIOS versions simply don't allow XP to set XMS. I've tried every
setting suggested but still no XMS memory. Unless there's a BIOS upgrade
for your machine, it won't work. I have found a program called DOSbox that
allows me to set up a virtual machine with XP and I can get some programs to
run that don't ordinarily.

http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/information.php

Tom Lake

 

[Alex Nichol]

I would be glad for your help with following problem.
I'm running Lotus 123 under DOS enviroment in Win XP.
I can start it correctly but when I try to open file that
is larger than 900 KB I get error message "not enough
memory". I've got 256 MB RAM installed in my notebook.
When I use mem /c I get

Lotus uses IIRC Expanded memory (EMM) rather than XMS. But in any case,
For best DOS conventional memory and support for EM/XMS, edit the
windows\system32\config.nt and autoexec.nt files.

In config.nt have (apart from the large number of REM lines) just
EMM = B=4000 RAM
(note the exact spaces - either side of the first = and before RAM,
none next to the second =) and

dos=high, umb
device=%SystemRoot%\system32\himem.sys
files=40
(or higher files= if needed)

and in autoexec.nt have

REM Install DPMI support
lh %SystemRoot%\system32\dosx

with other earlier lh lines REM ed out, and then any SET or PATH lines
that may already be present at the end.

This should give about 612K conventional for a program, run from a
shortcut made to its .exe file. R-click the shortcut, Properties and on
the Memory page you can set an explicit value - rather than Auto - for
any EMM or XMS memory it may need, up to 16MB, and for initial
environment space