Hi,
I'm building a couple of new machines and decided to try SvarDOS instead of my usual personal Frankenstein of "it's basically DR-DOS". I'm running into an issue where QEMM 97 (9.0) is hanging at load for both systems. (One is a Dell Optiplex 5040 with i7-7600 and 8 GB RAM; the other is an AMD Athlon 300U system with 4 GB RAM.)
I've never seen QEMM hang like this in DR-DOS, even with EDR-DOS (both 7.01.07 and 7.01.08 WIP). I'm not sure how to really diagnose the problem, so I figured that posting here might work well, in case someone else has already seen it.
Once QEMM386.SYS (with or without flags) scans memory, it just hangs and if I step with F8, there is no next DEVICE line to acknowledge. Also, the three finger salute does not work once it hangs. This would indicate to me that QEMM is flailing about and failing on something.
The only thing I note as unusual is that QEMM386 is only able to see 261756K. I was pretty sure that it normally sees 262144K. Yes, I'm aware the rest is wasted. But I don't have any smaller DIMMs lying around, and I'm not sure one can buy small enough capacity DDR3L DIMMs or DDR4 SO-DIMMs at a reasonable enough price to make it worthwhile to not waste the memory.
Potentially also of interest, and potentially related: MS HIMEM 3.95 sometimes (but not always) fails to load claiming that VDISK.SYS is already loaded (but I'm not loading it...).
And since someone is bound to ask: I'm trying to get QEMM working to run DESQview. I've never seen it work fully with any other memory manager, but I'd not mind being proven wrong.
Hmmmm.... Since I posted, I got the idea to try to run HIMEM with TESTMEM. It also hangs. What might SvarDOS be doing special that not even MS HIMEM works properly?
I do not think its a general problem with the EDR kernel. For me both Microsoft HIMEM.SYS and QEMM work just fine. My first guess would be that it has something to do with the size of the installed memory. Have you or can you please test if it works with MS-DOS? If not, then I think its HIMEM / QEMM to blame.