Hi, welcome to the club of FreeDOS Windows 3.1 users :-). > http://robert.gotdaemon.net/win31-freedos/
I would like to add that you get a different error message when attempting to use 386 enhanced mode if emm386 is not loaded. Windows tries to take over the whole work of emm386 in 386 mode, using an interface called GEMMIS. As this interface is complex and not well documented and only needed for Windows, our EMM386 does not support it. You can also use the MS HIMEM / MS EMM386 which ship with Windows 3.1 and which do support GEMMIS. However, I found them to run a lot worse than FreeDOS HIMEM / EMM386 on modern hardware. You might want to try newer MS versions, though. Talking about MS drivers: You should explicitly load SMARTDRV in "no delayed writes" mode or just replace it by LBACACHE ;-). It seems that SMARTDRV's delayed writes do not work reliably with the FreeDOS kernel. Heh, I love spreading FUD against MS ;-). The crash when attempting to run a DOS program or DOS box from within Windows is caused by wswap exe or dswap exe of Windows being unable to "swap the context" of the DOS session with the FreeDOS kernel. In other words, they cannot modify the running DOS to make it "free" to start a new DOS program while Windows is still around in the background. CuteMouse may fail to detect that Windows is active. Then CuteMouse would keep trying to access the mouse hardware while the Windows mouse driver is doing the same. Solution: Do not load CuteMouse. http://www.deskwork.de/DOWNLOAD/DOS/WINDOWS.TXT has some additional hints in German: It basically recommends using /D:sfvcx (no system breakpoints in UMB/ROM area, no 32bit disk access, no virtual hard- disk IRQs, no 32bit file access, no usage of UMB/pageframe area). Not all Windows versions have all of those /D:... options. The text also tells that you must use a small nonpermanent swap file even if you have a lot of RAM, and that you must edit your system ini file [386Enh] section, adding a line: PageOverCommit=1 this means that virtual memory size = 1 * physical memory size. Default is a factor of 4, but Windows 3.1 cannot handle more than 1 GB of virtual memory and would crash with more than 256 MB RAM. If you have more than 1 GB RAM, you will have to use the /MAX option of our HIMEM to make at most 1 GB useable for DOS. Translation help for other [386Enh] suggestions: Fuegen ... ein (einfuegen) means insert Entfernen ... means remove ... There are several interesting suggestions for your system ini in the WINDOWS.TXT file, so you may want to download it and try them. Eric PS: I have a cheat around which makes Windows 3.1 believe that FreeDOS is compatible to 386 enhanced mode, while it is not. Windows will just start up and crash very soon with that. ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is Sponsored by the Better Software Conference & EXPO September 19-22, 2005 * San Francisco, CA * Development Lifecycle Practices Agile & Plan-Driven Development * Managing Projects & Teams * Testing & QA Security * Process Improvement & Measurement * http://www.sqe.com/bsce5sf _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
