EMS problem with usb driver
 

I need to load EMS (EMM386.exe) and USBMASS (shareware usb 2.0 driver) on this harddrive-less Pentium 1 computer to run Dune with music directly from a usb stick.

With ems, while usbmass.exe loads, when I check my usb stick dir, instead of the list of files, all I see is "IO.SYS" and nothing else.

So I guess this has to do with emm386 and how it is using some part of the memory that usbmass.exe needs, because without ems, usbmass.exe works fine.
I was trying many configurations but although I read a lot and tried a lot, I'm a complete ignorant of how to fine-tune emm386 and assign "parts" of the memory.

The usbmass.exe allows one to define the start address of i/o pool and the start address of memory pool, the help page says:

/io:n start address of I/O pool (default 0x00002000)
/M:n start address of memory pool (default 0x000D0000)

So what parameters should I pass to either emm386.exe or usbmass.exe to get them both working at the same time?

Thank you in advance.

Try a different memory manager, jemm386 for example.

You're trying something really tricky. If there's any chance of it working I guess you could try identifying at what address a module is loaded with "mem /c" and then "mem /m:---" with the name of the module. Add /p if info doesn't fit a single screen page.

I'm not sure it's possible at all, as far as I know emm386 changes the whole memory model and address space, as well as where other stuff is loaded, and was famous to cause all kind of incompatibilities.

To get around these compatibility issues you could also try a different, 3rd party expanded memory driver, such as QEMM.
EDIT or jemm386 as Zirkoni says, I don't know them all.

I finally got it working guys!

The magic line is:

device=emm386.exe ram i=eeee-efff

It was a shot in the dark because actually to be honest, I don't really know what area of the memory I'm assigning (I can't understand hex, but I know its at the end of... what?), I don't know which area of the memory usbmass uses, and so on.

Why this works? I don't have an idea why it works but it does. I'd like you to help me figure out why. I can do all the tests that you want.

It would be different between different computers and configurations... Congratulations.

The Windows Calculator can convert between hex and decimal

...
9 = 9
A = 10
B = 11
C = 12
D = 13
E = 14
F = 15

10 = 16
11 = 17
...
1A = 26
... ...
EEEE = 61166‬
EFFF = 61439‬

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positi...numeral_system