Increase conventional RAM in Wndows

Question

I have a program that requires 512KB of conventional RAM but my cmd.exe only reports 500KB. My question is how do I increase RAM to the program. Thanks.

Is there some reason you have to use QBASIC? – Peter Ruderman Oct 16 '18 at 04:49 — Peter Ruderman, Oct 16 '18 at 04:49
The program i am using is in qbasic. – Azathoth Oct 16 '18 at 05:01 — Azathoth, Oct 16 '18 at 05:01

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 16 '18 at 04:53

2

I'd say your best bet is to use a more modern programming language, but if you're constrained to QBASIC for whatever reason, you might give QB64 a try: https://www.qb64.org/

answered Oct 16 '18 at 04:53

Peter Ruderman

12,241
1
36
58

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Nov 12 '18 at 09:48

1

I managed to free some conventional ram by specifying:

rem config.nt file contents:
emm=ram
dos=high,umb
devicehigh=%SystemRoot%\system32\himem.sys
devicehigh=%SystemRoot%\system32\ansi.sys
files=255

edited Nov 12 '18 at 09:48

eoredson

1,167
2
14
29

answered Oct 22 '18 at 02:10

Azathoth

105
1
9

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 19 '19 at 03:05

After freeing up some RAM in Windows, using MEM declares the following:

655360 bytes total conventional memory
655360 bytes available to MS-DOS
626224 largest executable program size

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

But what I cannot figure out is why the available contiguous extended memory is always 0?

Increase conventional RAM in Wndows

3 Answers3