CompuServe Messages

Main consideration with DOS 6 is DoubleSpace. You can use a DoubleSpace drive for any 3DS2 purpose EXCEPT the Phar Lap swapfile. That MUST be on an UNCOMPRESSED drive! Some people, including me, have encountered problems with EMM386.EXE with NOEMS (to give more UMB space) but VCPI left enabled (needed for 3DS). I prefer QEMM-386, and the new Version 7 looks even nicer. For QEMM 6, if you don't use Stealth and don't need EMS for other programs, you can add "FRAME=NONE FEMS" to the CONFIG.SYS line to get rid of the EMS Page Frame, freeing up 64kB of UMB space. If you don't have Windows 3, add "NW3" to disable Windows 3 support and free up a kB or so of conventional RAM. If you aren't using any multitasker, add "MAPS=0 TA=1" to further reduce RAM usage. If you have a Rendering-Only machine that will be doing ONLY 3DS2 renders you may want to disable XMS ("NOXMS") support and give certain other params to maximize the EMS/VCPI memory available to 3DS, to minimize the chances of time-consuming swapping during rendering. Remember that 3DS2 itself needs very little conventional RAM — I've started it running on a machine which had less than 256kB conventional RAM availbale! It uses protected memory (above 1MB — via either VCPI, EMS, XMS, or INT 15) exclusively once up and running.