| Q: | When I have EMS Magic loaded, I don't have enough free
conventional memory to run my program/game. |
| A: | See the Tips section for advice on
freeing up conventional memory.
|
| Q: | I'm trying to load EMS Magic in my
CONFIG.SYS/CONFIG.NT
but it's not working. Why? |
| A: | EMS Magic is a self-loading dynamic device driver. This means
that it must be run as a program and not loaded as a device driver, as opposed to EMM386. If you
want to load EMS Magic at startup, add the line:
emsmagic
to your
AUTOEXEC.BAT/AUTOEXEC.NT
with the appropriate switches.
|
| Q: | Can EMS Magic backfill conventional memory? |
| A: | At this time, no. EMS Magic currently supports a single 64K
page frame only. If there is a demand for it, backfilling support may be added in future versions.
|
| Q: | Can EMS Magic provide UMBs like EMM386? |
| A: | No. UMB support may be obtained with an alternative driver,
such as UMBPCI, or EMM386 with
the NOEMS parameter. (This applies to DOS or Windows 9x only; the NTVDM in Windows NTx automatically
provides UMBs.)
|
| Q: | My program/game starts, but the text is all scrambled.
Help! |
| A: | This is actually not related to EMS Magic, but it's an easy
problem to fix. Your video card does not have an 8x14 (EGA) ROM font. Many manufacturers leave out
this font to save ROM space for other functions. A freeware TSR called
FIX8X14 can provide
an 8x14 font in this case.
|
| Q: | Hasn't this been done before? |
| A: | To be honest, when I started this project, I had never heard
of an existing program that emulated EMS entirely in software using XMS. Of course I was wrong. A
couple weeks in, I stumbled upon EMS40.SYS (Douglas Boling) on
Simtel, and then
later I found EMSimulator (Karlton W. Kam), EMM.SYS (Mike H. Greve), and EMM286 (Jjex Software).
However, after I tried them out, I found that the existing EMS emulators weren't very
satisfactory. Most of them take over extended memory completely, meaning they won't work HIMEM/XMS.
In addition, they support only EMS 3.2 functions, or a subset of EMS 4.0 functions. All except
EMM286 are SYS device drivers, which means they cannot be loaded and unloaded dynamically. (Even
EMM286 cannot be unloaded, just disabled.) And none of them managed to work properly with
all the programs I tested. Actually, most crashed under Windows XP.
So I decided to continue my project, and I have to say the result is much better than any of the
previous solutions. But don't take my word for it; try out the alternatives for yourself. ;)
|
| Q: | How can I contact the author of EMS Magic? |
| A: | Email support@emsmagic.com.
|