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Ems and toshiba t3100

M

mindingulove

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Mar 8, 2014
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Brazil petropolis
Hello :)
I have a tosh ova t3100 and 640k plus 384k extended all in a 286 cpu.
Even tough dos recognizes the extended memory, windows 3 won't. How do I enable it ? Thanks
 
Out of curiosity I did a quick Google and happened across the manual for the T3100e. (Which I assume is what you have since it offered "1MB" as a standard memory configuration; the original 3100 had 640k; all additional memory over that was on add-on cards that came in 1 and 2MB flavors with separate EMS and XMS boards.) There's a sort of confusing part of the manual where it talks about memory allocation that implies that the system did actually offer an EMS mapper in addition to just XMS RAM. (The confusing part was it wasn't clear if the EMS option was available if you didn't have more than 1MB of RAM.) Just to be clear, your additional 384k is definitely configured as Extended XMS RAM? (IE, when you say that DOS recognizes the additional RAM you're loading something like himem.sys and it's working?

What message do you get if you attempt to explicitly force standard mode with "WIN /s"?

You're not loading any disk caching software or anything, are you? I have this vague memory that Windows would refuse to bother with Standard mode unless you had more than X-many-K of free XMS, but I completely don't remember what the value of "X" was. I *think* it was low enough that you could load DOS "high" on a 1MB machine but I'm not absolutely sure of it.
 
I am using msdos 6.22 it recognizes all the memory, however windows 3.0 won't display all the memory. I copied himem.sys from dos to windows folder and executed win /s now it displays free memory 645k, that means it's ok now I guess
 
This may only serve to make matters more obscure, but: During the self-test, the T3100e BIOS tests the data path to 16 I/O ports. Failure to access these causes a 'LIM PAGE REGISTER ERROR' to be reported.

0x0208, 0x4208, 0x8208, 0xc208
0x0218, 0x4218, 0x8218, 0xc218
0x0258, 0x4258, 0x8258, 0xc258
0x0268, 0x4268, 0x8268, 0xc268

The first four, at least, seem to map 16k pages into a 64k page frame at D0000-DFFFF. On a quick inspection, I can't see what, if anything, the other twelve do.

Does anyone know if Toshiba produced an EMS driver for this hardware? The available MS-DOS 3.3 or 4.01 disk sets don't seem to have anything obvious.
 
Wow, a blast from the past...

Where did you dig up that info? ISTR that there was an option in the BIOS to select how to use the upper memory but wetware memory ain't what it used to be...

m
 
MikeS said:
Wow, a blast from the past...

Where did you dig up that info? ISTR that there was an option in the BIOS to select how to use the upper memory but wetware memory ain't what it used to be...
Click to expand...

Disassembling the BIOS. And you're right, there are options in the setup screen to control how the memory is used:
Code: 
2. Memory size
     System memory     =  640KB
     Extended memory   =    1MB
     Expanded memory   =  0.5MB + 384KB
'System memory' can be 512k or 640k. The extended memory can be allocated in units of 512k, with whatever's left over used as expanded memory. How this mapping is communicated to the hardware is another thing I don't know.
 
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