Hacker News
DOS Memory Management
9 points by supermatou
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4 comments
KellyCriterion
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AUTOEXEC.BAT & HIMEM.SYS rulers - rise your hand if you liked it: XMS, EMS and all that - what a great time before we had unified mem, right? :-D
LOL
TMWNN
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From Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_game>:
>By 1993, PC games required much more memory than other software, often consuming all of conventional memory, while device drivers could go into upper memory with DOS memory managers. Players found modifying `CONFIG.SYS` and `AUTOEXEC.BAT` files for memory management cumbersome and confusing, and each game needed a different configuration. (The game Les Manley in: Lost in L.A. satirizes this by depicting two beautiful women exhaust the hero in bed, by requesting that he again explain the difference between extended and expanded memory.)
burnt-resistor
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Later, V-Com Memory Commander allowed 902 KiB of free conventional memory instead of something like 623 using a number of tricks.