Aahhhhhhh, of course. No Ems.

sven33 on 27/4/2003 at 11:18

Hi everyone, I just want to say that the UUW series is one of the best ever made for any format.

I know I will probably recieve hate-mail for asking this but I have honestly tried.

How can I get UUWI and II to work on my new system?
I used to play on a 386 back in the day. I have an AMD athlon 1800xp, 256 DDR RAM, Geforce 4 Mx440 graphics card and a k7vmm+ motherboard running W2000 with updates installed. If anyone can help Iwould appreciate it. (If giving instructions remember, I'm an idiot.)
p.s I have both versions already.

soundman on 29/4/2003 at 09:54

Well, I figured out why UW1 and 2 wasn't working.

My motherboard apparently doesn't support Ems memory. Is there anyway to 'fool' it in any way, or do I have to wander over to the PC and pick up a motherboard that does support Ems? or maybe buy old memory?, my motherboard (Mainboard k7vmm+) has some SDRAM slots.

If anyone knows are cares, don't hesitate. Cheers.

:erg:

Tej on 30/4/2003 at 00:14

You know, I've only recently been looking into this matter, because with all the hundreds of megs of memory, in DOS I could not make anything to run in the upper memory block. Of course all the mscdex's and mouse's and sbeint's clogged the 640 KB so that some of the games wouldn't work.

After looking into some of the old DOS Help files, I have discovered that EMM386 somehow makes the entire upper memory as XMS, and leaves nothing to EMS. But, there is an option RAM:

Quote:

from the DOS Help
RAM=mmmm-nnnn
Specifies a range of segment addresses to be used for UMBs and also enables EMS support. If you do not specify a range, EMM386 uses all available adapter space to create UMBs and a page frame for EMS.

Another potentially useful option is MIN:

Quote:

from the DOS Help
MIN=size
Specifies the minimum amount of EMS/VCPI memory (in kilobytes) that EMM386 will provide, if that amount of memory is available. EMM386 reserves this amount of extended memory for use as EMS/VCPI memory when EMM386 is loaded by the DEVICE=EMM386.EXE command in your CONFIG.SYS file. EMM386 may be able to provide additional EMS/VCPI memory (up to the amount specified by the MEMORY parameter) if sufficient XMS memory is available when a program requests EMS/VCPI memory. Values are in the range 0 through the value specified by the MEMORY parameter. The default value is 256. If you specify the NOEMS switch, the default value is 0. If the value of MIN is greater than the value of MEMORY, EMM386 uses the value specified by MIN.

So, what worked for me, was the following three lines in the config.sys:

DOS=HIGH,UMB
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\EMM386.EXE RAM MIN=512

You can also try without the MIN switch. The down side of this config.sys is that Win98 will probably complain that it cannot boot due to the insufficient amount of memory...
:tsktsk:

By the way, I know I've read somewhere that the DOS=HIGH,UMB line should come after the DEVICE=EMM386.EXE, but somehow the Win98 always forces it before anything else no matter what you do to config.sys. Is there any way to bypass that? Is that even necessairy?

The Sage Of Time on 30/4/2003 at 06:20

The answer to your question isn't summed up easily, so.. What problems are you experiencing?
If you are using Windows XP, a special patch is required in order to even start UW.
If sound isn't working, some sound card tweaking may be required, or if you are on a NT OS (like XP..)
You can use VDMS, a sound card emulator that will allow you to play music, sounds and etc in old DOS games.
If you, on the other hand, are simply getting an error message, state what the error is and i'll help you further..

Win NT UW Patch - (http://www.sircabirus.com/ultimaunderworld/pages/)
VDMS Sound Card Emulator - (http://ntvdm.cjb.net/)

Shadowcat on 30/4/2003 at 07:20

soundman, go ahead and try the WinNT patch - Windows 2000 is based on Windows NT (I suspect you know that, but erring on the side of caution :), so if it works for NT and XP, the chances are pretty good that it will be happy on 2K as well!

Regarding your EMS queries, I'm 99% certain that EMS/XMS/etc are entirely operating system constructs, and have nothing whatsoever to do with your motherboard or physical memory. All the extended memory types were added into DOS because they couldn't fix the 640K limit without breaking a whole lot of programs. WinNT and its successors (Win2000, WinXP, Win2003) have completely different systems of memory management, and therefore EMS does not exist as such. (There is some degree of emulation available in these versions of Windows, however, to allow you to run some DOS programs.)

I haven't checked it out myself, but I rather suspect that the WinNT patch mentioned by The Sage of Time will sort you out... follow the link and see how you get on.

p.s. I've merged your threads together, as it seemed counter-productive to have two threads about the same topic :)