DOS ain't dead - DOS32pae - a nice little toy

Japheth

Germany (South),
21.02.2021, 08:54

DOS32pae - a nice little toy (Announce)

Hello friends,

just now I made a little program public:

https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/DOS32pae

It's kind of a fork of https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/Dos64-stub, for 32-bit only.

Using PAE paging, this tiny "DOS extender", although 32-bit and thus limited to 4GB of address space, is able to use huge amounts of memory. There's a sample supplied, Alloc.asm, that demonstrates this feature, backfilling 4092 MB of "linear" memory with physical memory allocated via XMS v3.5 beyond the 4 GB barrier ( probably making this little sample the first DOS program that needs 8 GB of memory :-D ).

Besides this, there's not much to tell. I think I mention this thing only because it's my 18. repository on github.

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MS-DOS forever!

DosWorld

05.03.2021, 04:17

@ Japheth

DOS32pae - a nice little toy

Post reply

> Hello friends,
>
> just now I made a little program public:
>
> limited to 4GB of address space, is able to use huge amounts of memory.
> There's a sample supplied, Alloc.asm, that demonstrates this feature,
> backfilling 4092 MB of "linear" memory with physical memory allocated via

Mmm... Sorry, It is allow allocate 4GB as one memory piece ??

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Make DOS great again!
Make Russia small again!

Japheth

Germany (South),
05.03.2021, 19:00

@ DosWorld

DOS32pae - a nice little toy

Post reply

> Mmm... Sorry, It is allow allocate 4GB as one memory piece ??

Well, yes - who should disallow it?

The sample's using XMS v3.5, that is: HimemSX.

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MS-DOS forever!

Japheth

Germany (South),
06.03.2021, 18:31

@ Japheth

Samples added - including HDAplayX

Post reply

> Besides this, there's not much to tell.

Just now I added a few features - it's on the way to become a useable tool.

There's now even a real application: HDAplayX. This is a .wav player with the following features:

- accesses the Intel HDA controller directly.
- loads the samples in extended memory beyond 4 GB ( needs HimemSX :-D )
- NO "user interface" - just starts to play, then launches a shell.

The last "feature" is cool, because this allows to run another application during playing. So it's possible to run DOOM and let the player emit some Reiki music in the background. :-P . Restriction: the HDA controller must support 64-bit physical addresses - and the machine must have more than 4 GB!

It's all still a bit experimental, for adventurers only. If you're used to run DOS in VBox or DOSBox only, dos32pae is probably NOT for you.

https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/DOS32pae

https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/DOS32pae/releases/download/v2/dos32pae_v1b.ZIP

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MS-DOS forever!