Re: UMB and 386/486 --> status of FreeDOS emm386 etc.

Hi, you (Imre) over-criticize Tom. Here some facts:

- no EMM386 can be loaded from the command line. Would be cool, but is
  not needed. When invoked from the command line, normal emm386 only allow
  to change settings of the copy loaded via config.sys ...
- VCPI -DOES- run with EMS 3.2, but you do need 4k chunksize for VCPI, so
  implementing 4k chunksize for "alloc" is needed anyway and this in turn
  eases implementation of EMS 4.0 ...
- No idea whether the UMB routines need optimization. Feel free to optimize.

And finally:
The code is hard to read because it is based on a monolithic ASM version
without UMB that was published by a German PC magazine. Only very few
people understand the workings of a v86 host and how to set up paging,
multitasking, ... - basically if you have all that knowledge, you can write
your own 32bit multitasking operating system -including- a DOS box for it.
I think I have a rough understanding of most things, but as you can see,
my emmsys.asm does not fully work. So I do not get it completely. By the
way, emmsys.asm does not return to DOS yet. Making it work will be a bigger
task!
Tom has a rough understanding, too, but he cannot do much more than add
stuff to the protected mode part -or- the v86 part. He is unable to do
bigger changes to the interface between both, and just using the one used
in the magazine version. Excuse me if I do false claims here. However, you
can be sure that initializing protected multitasking paged mode and a v86
task inside it, plus managing its needs from protected mode is quite
tricky.

However, I agree that it should be possible to split the source as you
describe, as long as we do not touch a thing about the order of code in
memory (which would require us to understand it better).

Eric