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What about the 64 KiB and 640 KiB problems / how much memory is supported by FB in DOS?

dos FB KIB memory problems supported
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What about the 64 KiB and 640 KiB problems / how much memory is supported by FB in DOS?

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Memory management is business of the DPMI host, rather than the compiler. FreeBASIC and executables generated by it do not suffer from this problem, since they use 32-bit DPMI code, rather than real mode. You can use almost all the memory of your PC, with some limitations, but they are far above 64 or 640 KiB. CWSDPMI r5 is verified to work well up to 512 MiB only, additional memory does not crash it (unlike some older versions), but is silently ignored. HDPMI is supposed to support more: up to 4 GiB (the limit of 32-bit addressing), but there was not much testing on such huge machines – verified up to cca 1.5 GiB. FreeBASIC and code generated by it do not require classical DOS based memory managers (HIMEM/XMS and EMM386/EMS), but are supposed to coexist with them if they are present. All this of course applies to true DOS only, things like “Dos Box” will keep the control over the memory management and provide only a small piece of memory (depends, up to cca 64 MiB) to your DOS code.

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