Misplaced Pages

DOS/4G

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.
(Redirected from DOS4GW)
This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages)
This article relies excessively on references to primary sources. Please improve this article by adding secondary or tertiary sources.
Find sources: "DOS/4G" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (February 2015) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
This article has an unclear citation style. The references used may be made clearer with a different or consistent style of citation and footnoting. (May 2019) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
(Learn how and when to remove this message)
DOS/4G
Developer(s)Tenberry Software
Final release2.01 / April 3, 1996; 28 years ago (1996-04-03)
Operating systemDOS
PlatformIA-32
TypeDOS extender
LicenseProprietary
Websiteweb.archive.org/web/20180628103312/tenberry.com/dos4g

DOS/4G is a 32-bit DOS extender developed by Rational Systems (later Tenberry Software). It allows DOS programs to eliminate the 640 KB conventional memory limit by addressing up to 64 MB of extended memory on Intel 80386 and above machines.

Features

Functioning as a highly flexible and reusable memory extension library, DOS/4G allowed programmers to access extended memory without writing specialized code. It embeds itself in the executable file at linking time and executes before main application code, so usually DOS/4G initialization messages show up at launch. It can in principle operate within MS-DOS, PC DOS, DR-DOS and other DOS clones, the DOS boxes of OS/2, Microsoft Windows, Windows NT and Windows 95, and DOS emulators such as DOSBox. However, in practice few DOS/4G games or other applications will run on non-DOS-based versions of Windows, including Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP, since none of these allow direct access to the hardware as was used for display rendering in those days.

History

DOS/4GW 1.95 was a free limited edition of DOS/4G and was included with the Watcom C compiler with a commercial re-distribution license. It was made widely popular by computer games like Doom or Tomb Raider.

Initial versions of DOS/4G had trouble with secondary DMA channels on the ISA bus, which prevented 16-bit devices like Gravis Ultrasound series from normally functioning; Gravis even had to develop PREPGAME, a patch utility which updated the game executable with a new version 1.97 to fix the incompatibility.

In case of problems, DOS/4G or DOS/4GW can be replaced with the newer and free DOS/32; a patch utility can even replace DOS/4G code embedded inside a compiled executable file.

See also

References

  1. "DOS/4G Release Notes". Archived from the original on 2018-05-07.
  2. DOS4/GW Is it free? Can you distribute it?
  3. DOS4G FAQ
  4. TOOLS:DOS32A - DOSBoxWiki

External links

Stub icon

This DOS software-related article is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it.

Categories: