Dos crippled on new boards?

[Eck_abx]

Hey,

I'm resigned to just XP on my new board unless someone knows something I haven't tried yet. Asus replied to my help request with a step-by-step list for clean installing Windows. Heh, if I don't have that down by now!

The problem is that although my Asus A7V880 manual states the board supports Windows 98SE, Me, 2000, XP, the 98 support is Windows only, with dos-mode just for emergency situations.

I tested my memory, and ran Everest and everything looks okay with the hardware. The board runs stable with 98SE or XP HE SP2. No weird errors, freezes, reboots, etc. The memory is 2x512MB of the Crucial version of the Asus supported Micron 3200 DDR-SDRAM. I set the known VCACHE MaxFileCache tinker for memory over 512MB.

Windows will not bootup with any normal dos memory optimizations listed in config.sys, nor will dos run with normal amounts of conventional memory available. Same with a boot disk.

With nothing in autoexec or config (excepting path statements), everything is perfect. However, try putting the standard:

device=c:\windows\himem.sys /testmem:off
device=c:\windows\emm386.exe RAM
dos=high,umb

in there, and the blank hits the fan. Himem cannot control the A20 line, emm is unable to build page frame and won't load (although with a boot disc it will pause after that and then load, but with severely limited extended memory and only about 400K conventional memory available), then the Windows splash screen will flash for a moment then leave, and the dos message is that Windows doesn't have enough memory to start and to try eliminating extraneous drivers from the config files. Then the system shuts down.

I've tried entering the line dos16m=2 into autoexec and the M:1 switch into the himem.sys line, to no effect. I also tried A20Control:ON and OFF, with no change.

There's no getting into Windows unless I take all that stuff out. However, my main reason for using 98 was to be able to use my sblive dos drivers in dos mode to play old dos games. Unfortunately, even with a boot disk this is not possible. Apparently the board also is not set for non-maskable interrupts, as even though the live driver loads up properly (with the boot disk) with the proper settings and the sound works, most games cannot find the card. You see the sbego program struggling to find the card and when it does, the settings are some weird numbers (not 220-7-5-1-330 as it is loaded to by the driver while dos is loading). And, sbego's tests can't be heard even though it shows no errors. Surprisingly, a couple of games find the card on 220-7-1 and work! But most can't locate it. 400K is not enough. The same settings on my Abit KT7A offer 601K with mouse, cdrom, smartdrive, and the sblive driver loaded. This board is just usurping dos memory for its own use.

I've looked all over the BIOS setup for something to tinker with regarding this and found nothing.

So it looks as though I'm stuck in the present with this board. (Windows XP.) I do use DosBox and vdmsound, but nothing runs dos quite as good as dos!

Any thoughts on any possible tinkering to fully utilize 98 AND dos7.1?

[Tapir]

Wouldn't that be like asking it to load to OS??

Can you share Asus's step by step procedure?

[Eck_abx]

Uhh, It's like 1-Remove all hardware except video, keyboard, mouse 2-Install Windows 3-Install chipset driver 4-Install video driver, etc, etc.

I would think most of us (I am new here, but still...) know that stuff.

The problem appears to be the way the BIOS utilizes the hardware. It makes it impossible to use dos except for limited troubleshooting. Dos within Windows will work fine. If I wanted Windows Me I'd just install that!

[John64]

have you run with one stick, i can remember Win98 not liking 1 gb, and it was built 10ish years after dos

[Tapir]

Ok, I think I now follow you after reading your 1st again. (Excuse the delay in - Friday you know) Yes Dos has a problem with some newer stuff - hardware and bios re: functionality. I think this was discussed in another thread in the past. Been a long time since I did any experiment with dos but what I recall is what I said above.

On the procedure just thought how they would match up with the standard/ accepted/proper method of installing windows.

[Eck_abx]

I see. It's just a list, like install Windows, then chipset drivers, then DirectX, then Video drivers, then SCSI/ATA cards, then LAN/NIC, then modem, other devices, then sound. Then reboot, and if it works your system is installed correctly! (A Paraphrase, but that's their order.) I usually install the sound before the ethernet though. Whatever, that's obviously not the kind of help I was looking for. I asked them how to get Windows to boot with dos related stuff (like EMM386, etc.), but instead they told me the order to install system drivers.

If I had some kind of Fast A20 enable/disable setting in the Bios Setup I would try that, but the system seems to have been designed to eliminate the use of Ms-Dos.

To be truthful, it's not the end of the world as the system runs XP great. I just wish there was some warning of the incompatiblity and I would have went for a different board with perhaps slightly less speed but still an upgrade from my old Abit KT7A with the 1.2GHz T-Bird (266Mhz).

I like doing things this way. Back when I bought the KT7A it was just going through its last bios updates and all the kinks were basically worked out and fixed just in time for me to use it, and when everyone else was buying the next generation. Meanwhile the board gave me several years of stable use without going through the early buggy stages. Same thing with the Asus A7V880. I figured the KT880 chipset was the last and most powerful chipset for the AthlonXP series and sure enough the board has recently gotten what is probably the last series of bios updates before Asus shifts their attention away from it. I'll probably get several years of (hopefully) kinks already worked out stability from it. I'm not a heavy gamer (I like Baseball Mogul and Microsoft Baseball 2001, Nintendo NES simulation and old arcade stuff), just a lot of mp3 playing and DVD watching and some encoding. The board speeds up my encoding to almost double the speed I was getting from the old box. The dos games play through Dosbox, and some through vdmsound.

I just would have rather have gotten the speed boost, but with the ability to use 98. Oh well.

Oh. I know about the 512MB stuff. 98 runs fine with a gig as long as you make the VCACHE adjustment in system.ini (MaxFileCache=524288), and limit the memory to a gig in msconfig's advanced settings. It's the A20 line that himem.sys can't latch onto that's the problem. It doesn't give emm386 enough memory to manage and Windows hiccups. It's enough for dos alone with a boot disk, but not enough to run anything like a game with. And, the board doesn't seem to have those non-maskable interrupts that the Sblive's dos drivers require.