I've been "repurposing" the Celeron 2.4GHz XP machine that I bought for Nikki almost 10 years ago to play games. She's moved on, and I still write software for DOS. WIN98 is the last OS from Microsoft that can be booted into "real-Mode", which is perfect for doing embedded software. I've used older machines -Pentium Pro- for this for years.
SO- a week of learning tricks, 8GByte boot partition "OR ELSE" the computer turns itself off on installation;
Limit WIN98 to 768MBytes in the system.ini; limit cache to 256MBytes in order run run DOS boxes and some software. You may have to play with these- I did a lot of trial and error to max it out. Have it working with 768MBytes now.
Get a computer that runs DOS using 1.2GBytes and Windows using 512MByte that does not turn itself off. Just wrote a DOS program that uses 800MBytes of memory. In FORTRAN, baby! I hit the 640KByte barrier in 1988 and blasted right through it using Phar Lap DOS and Microway compilers.
The array sizes are limited to 64MBytes per array, but that is big enough to load the 36MBytes files from the M9 and M Monochrom. I used to write a lot of my own image processing code.
Why DOS? My code re-writes the interrupt vector table, and takes over the counter-timer registers of the CPU. OS's usually don't like that.
DOS RULES, Baby!
SO- a week of learning tricks, 8GByte boot partition "OR ELSE" the computer turns itself off on installation;
Limit WIN98 to 768MBytes in the system.ini; limit cache to 256MBytes in order run run DOS boxes and some software. You may have to play with these- I did a lot of trial and error to max it out. Have it working with 768MBytes now.
Get a computer that runs DOS using 1.2GBytes and Windows using 512MByte that does not turn itself off. Just wrote a DOS program that uses 800MBytes of memory. In FORTRAN, baby! I hit the 640KByte barrier in 1988 and blasted right through it using Phar Lap DOS and Microway compilers.
The array sizes are limited to 64MBytes per array, but that is big enough to load the 36MBytes files from the M9 and M Monochrom. I used to write a lot of my own image processing code.
Why DOS? My code re-writes the interrupt vector table, and takes over the counter-timer registers of the CPU. OS's usually don't like that.
DOS RULES, Baby!