Re: [Freedos-devel] [Semi-OT] Thoughts: Actually doing stuff with MS-DOS 4.01

[Ralf Q. <fre...@gm...>]

On 8/16/2024 1:43 AM, Steve Nickolas via Freedos-devel wrote:
> Or maybe to implement the VCPI?
>>
>> Aitor
>>
>
> Is the EMM386 in MS-DOS 4.x new enough for that? 
I haven't specifically looked for that, but given that the source code 
released is likely an early version of MS-DOS 4.0, it could be that this 
is not included.
At the company that I worked at in 1990 (1985 through 1994 overall), we 
had a version of a VCPI compatible CEMM (Compaq's EMS memory manager) 
provided for use with Compaq/MS-DOS 3.31, and also in early versions of 
QEMM and 386Max.
Just looked this actually up, and VCPI was first included by the 
internal memory manager of what would become Windows 3.0 (Windows386) 
and was part of EMM386.EXE (not .SYS!) released with DOS 5.0.

The "secret sauce" to include VPCI might be in the GEMMIS (Global EMM 
Import Specification) documentation and that wasn't publicly available 
back then (Novell (in)famously didn't get a copy of the specs)...


Ralf