so... easy...

[A Black Falcon]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q275423/

How to enable EMS memory in WinME, most basic way... How did I manage to miss this for four years... actually it looks like I tried before, but it re-activated, or I didn't look hard enough or something, because one line was deactivated already and another identical one below it not, but whatever... it would have been really nice to have EMS years ago too, not just now. :( (I know, I can run all of those games in DOSBox, and that's what I did, but lots of them run too slow in DOSBox... of course some run too fast in normal speed, but too fast is often better than too slow, as long as it's not TOO fast...) :(

This had been annoying me for so long... it's really frusterating to find that it was something so simple...

[Great Rumbler]

The real solution: Get Windows XP

:p

[Dark Jaguar]

That will make things worse. This is MS-DOS stuff, and XP really doesn't have anything resembling that there.

And wow, I could have told you about that ABF, yes 4 years ago I knew it too. Try asking us before going on 4 years being totally stumped :D.

[A Black Falcon]

Ah, no. GR, think... what am I talking about? DOS GAMES. What is the biggest problem with Windows XP? The fact that legacy DOS support is almost completely broken! No, if I had XP I might be able to run 1/10th of my DOS games, but as it is, I can run everything that can cope with faster CPUs than it was designed to run on. That is, the majority of DOS games, actually. Yes, a few do need DOSBox because of speed issues (or are better there), but most either are the same or run worse... (slower; Master of Magic, TES I: Arena, Betrayal at Krondor, etc, etc) No, DOS games are the #1 reason why I LIKE having Windows ME, and whenever it is that I get XP, I would like to have a seperate partition with either ME or '98 on it so that I will continue to be able to natively run DOS programs.

And wow, I could have told you about that ABF, yes 4 years ago I knew it too. Try asking us before going on 4 years being totally stumped .

I really can't remember, but it looks like maybe once I actually had fixed it, and then something made the problem come back a few years ago and I couldn't remember what I'd done to fix it or something? I can't think of any other explanation for why there was that already-disabled (; before the line) line identical to the one I had to disable, just two lines above it... that IS how msconfig works, when you disable something and then something else re-enables it it doesn't recheck the old listing, it makes a new one. So maybe that's it... I hope... :D

And wow, I could have told you about that ABF, yes 4 years ago I knew it too. Try asking us before going on 4 years being totally stumped .

It used to be fine, DOSBox is only a minor hassle and ran games fast enough, but some games it can't run fast enough on my system... so now TES: Arena runs either a bit too fast (native) or annoyingly slow (dosbox). Bah. At least Betrayal at Krondor's speedup doesn't negatively impact the game... :) (Ultima Underworld also has the too fast/too slow problem, actually...)

On a related note, here's a really, really odd thing: TESII: Daggerfall runs better in DOSBox than TESI: Arena. Huh?

Oh, and I said four years because I know our previous computers, before this one, had EMM memory, and I know mine hasn't for a long time, but I can't remember if I ever had it working on this one for any period of time. DOSBox made me say 'good enough', but then today I was looking at some stuff about Oblivion, and it got me to go to the Bethesda forums, and I saw a thread on 'how to make Arena work in XP', and I said 'hmm how about ME' so I did a Yahoo search for something like 'EMM memory "windows millenium" and found something that had a detailed description of the answer (a site for how to run WordPerfect for DOS in Windows, actually...). :)

[A Black Falcon]

I thought I'd had EMS before... I was probably right. Something disabled EMS again and re-added the 'noems' line to system.ini, and I had to go into MSConfig again and re-disable it, adding a third disabled 'noems' line to the thing...

[lazyfatbum]

you are a giant nerd.