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NTVDM speed (or lack thereof) (Announce)

posted by marcov, 16.02.2011, 09:24

> > [More DOS-topical : I never found a good DOS task switcher but
> for
> > Windows itself. All DOS task switchers that I tried back then... were
> buggy
> > or deficient or both. IIRC that included taskers from Norton, Central
> Point
> > (when they had not yet become parts of the same entity), DRDOS's
> "tasmax",
> > and more.
>
> Desqview?

I've been co-sysop at a Desqview(later /X) BBS and Fido hub for years. Very stable, and fairly fast. DVX - SBBS (later RA) FrontDoor - FMail was a fairly common combination in those days.

From what I remember from it, the memory allocation was not as good as a real OS, memory was assigned to dosboxes on startup, and not demand-allocated. Setting lower memory limits on dosboxes helped with that (since all these systems were by definition memory-starved)

The BBS moved to NT4 later, when 32MB became affordable. (DV ran in 4 or 8MB, /X could run in 8, but prefered more, iirc the longest running config had a DX2/66 with 16MB.) The main reason for the move to NT4 was better and more reliable ethernet support, and still better multitasking.

NT4 felt sluggish as a desktop, but when everything was started, it was fairly bearable. (and e.g. the binary memory mapping architecture of Windows clearly helped here, since some apps had only a very small memory footprint during the day, but only required more memory and a large part of the binary in midnight events)

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