DOS Memory Management

I remember UMB. I remember that, as a teenager, I was obsessed with figuring out how to squeeze the most free conventional memory out of MS-DOS 6+ ... or 7+? I was stuck at around 615k, maybe 620ish. It annoyed me greatly, because I knew there was still headroom left.

The thing was, that upper memory wasn't just for TSRs. Anything one can shove there, would happily stay there and run just fine.

My journey towards the most free, conventional memory ended at 637k on my 386 DX-33 with 8megs of RAM and a SoundBlaster card, with everything possible being shoved to high memory. Mouse driver, MSCDEX and even COMMAND.COM.

637k. So proud, much wow!

Good times!

Good times. Our DOS game PaybackTime 2 was only capable of using conventional memory. That was a major reason for the game really not having any proper animations for its player characters.

'MZ' has been confirmed to be the initials of Mark Zbikowski, there's no question about it. It's not "Memory" + "Last".

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