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1 - You too can be part of the PCMR. It's not about the hardware in your rig, but the software in your heart! Age, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, religion, politics, income, and PC specs don't matter! If you love or want to learn about PCs, you're welcome!
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God, just making a boot disk and sequencing the tsr's in such a way for microprose games is such a pain, I'd hate to try and race to the bottom for that.
With QEMM386, conventional used memory could go down to 4KB.
It was just the structures and tables used to interact with DOS. All the system was in extended memory thanks to redirection by the paging unit.
Then you could add Desqview, and you could have a preemptive multitasking operating environment for DOS programs. You could have 520-600 KB of conventional memory per task, depending on your TSR and drivers.
ironically one of the ways these apps did that was filling the ram, hence forcing the paging of more memory to disk, then releasing the ram. pages in virtual ram will only go back to ram if they are accesed. so in effect it freed your ram.
these came after the "boom" of disk doublers like stacker. that compressed and decompressed the data on the fly.
Memory compression. During this time memory compression wasn't a thing built into the operating systems. Doing memory compression in this factor was essentially trading CPU cycles for more memory however so it wasn't only upsides.
ksm and uksm are kernel space merging, which deduplicates ram, so that if 2 chunks have the same contents, it stores one copy, and then a pointer to that copy
If something happens that would trigger a change to that memory, then it deduplicates the memory
It's intended use case is actually virtualization where you have tons of VMs with similar contents
Linux also has zram, which is entirely in memory. Basically it compresses and decompresses a portion of your RAM on the fly, effectively giving you more RAM in software. And it does that without ever touching your disk, unless it absolutely has to
not more capacity, reduced usage. ksm and uksm will share memory instead of duplicating it when possible (at a cpu cost, and security vulnerabilities). zswap is simply memory compression.
capacity means the maximum amount of ram (available and unavailable). It is not obtuse to simply point this out. I'm sorry if it came off that way though. But your original comment was just... objectively incorrect. The three you listed are different than increasing capacity. That is all
Edit: I would also point out that neither swapping via smb nor nfs increase capacity either. Things like that can certainly trick the computer into thinking capacity has increased, but the cpu cost (and network overhead) when actually swapping renders this method unsatisfactory when compared to actually increasing capacity or reducing usage.
Comparing them doesn't really make sense when talking about the original subject. It is a poor stopgap until you can actually get more ram
I think you're missing the point entirely... there was a joke about downloading something, and suddenly you can functionally have more ram... People assumed that's impossible... but you can functionally do it, by improving efficiency with something you download
You are also thinking whitebox and not blackbox... this is about perspective.
Blackbox usage doesn't know how much ram you have. What matters is how much ram you can allocate without crashing.
If allocating 1 process uses 10MB of ram, and allocating 100 normally uses a gig of ram, and then you download something that runs in the background, that the processes can't see... and suddenly they can allocate 150, when they normally would crash at 100... the capacity for running those processes which requested 10MB of ram goes up.
That's a blackbox view of memory. It doesn't know how much you have, but it knows when it crashes from allocating too much.
Similarly, providing virtual memory would actually do the same thing. But local virtual memory is not something any reasonable person would perceive as downloading, so I suggested smb or nfs. It doesn't matter if it isn't practical, or if it has poor performance, the point is you can make a network connection, and suddenly can write, and subsequently read (which is then downloading over the network) something functioning as memory.
From a practical standpoint, if someone has an app that uses 10GB of ram, and you download some software, run it, and the same app is now using 1GB of ram, and it's done with a sha identical application with no userspace changes at all? I'm going to call that downloading more ram.
OP literally has HIMEM.SYS loaded, which enables access to extended memory in excess of the first megabyte. Usable by famous DOS programs such as Warcraft II and Windows.
I did mention the one megabyte. The reason that DOS only had access to 640k easily was a convention where the other addresses weren't used for RAM, but instead for ROM or other shenanigans. While some motherboards could map some of the (relatively plentiful) memory from protected mode into that space, most could not. Meaning if you were coding for PC, you could rely on whatever DOS would spare you for the 640k, plus whatever you could use from extended or expanded, depending on how competent your compiler was.
Note that without far pointers, you could only address 64k; but this was not a problem on x86 normally, as pretty much everything had more RAM than that.
Yeah, but the memory is not correctly optimized. The more highly demanding games will not run, those want at least 620kb of conventional RAM to be present. You want to optimize your stack and buffers, and to use DEVICEHIGH and LOADHIGH in your config.sys and autoexec.bat respectively. If possible also switch to a command processor that can use high memory like 4DOS.
I mean generally each demanding program needed exactly its own special thing. If your game couldn't use extended memory, then you wouldn't have HIMEM.SYS. If it couldn't use expanded memory, then you wouldn't have EMM.SYS. If it didn't use a mouse, you wouldn't load the mouse driver for it. You would definitely never use SMARTDRV like he had there, that was a for like office programs or if you'd written a program that was processing data from the drive. If you had stuff you could load in high memory you sure would, but a lot of things wouldn't, and you were better off just only having exactly what you needed for a thirsty program.
There was this multiyear period where windows had access to effectively infinite RAM- like 8 megabytes or more- but doing anything in DOS was this incredible effort. But you needed DOS because Windows took a huge shit on your hardware and wouldn't let you touch it, nor would it correctly support the BIOS calls you needed. It was a very weird and stupid situation, and a solid argument that PCs sucked.
Huge! Arch has massive bloat ware you don’t need. I run a custom OS I vibe coded. Currently it uses around 2KB of RAM. Trying to get down to 1KB by next year. It benchmarks much faster than Arch as well. Was going to add support for a file system but it was pushing memory usage over 8KB and that’s just not worth it IMHO.
I just leave the ac cable unplugged .. 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% unbloated ram.. +/- global magneto resonance variable (Schumann Resonances)
Jokes aside, it really sucks we can’t just get a mainstream OS that is user friendly and not parted out to subscriptions and forced AI and insane privacy issues. It’s disappointing I can’t just buy tech than ow that tech in a society that as been ramming private property nonsense down my throat my entire life.
Ah, the good old days of trying to eke out the few missing kb of conventional memory because the game you were trying to run didn't have an extender built in...
Welcome to the PCMR, everyone from the frontpage! Please remember:
1 - You too can be part of the PCMR. It's not about the hardware in your rig, but the software in your heart! Age, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, religion, politics, income, and PC specs don't matter! If you love or want to learn about PCs, you're welcome!
2 - If you think owning a PC is too expensive, know that it is much cheaper than you may think. Check http://www.pcmasterrace.org for our famous builds and feel free to ask for tips and help here!
3 - Consider supporting the folding@home effort to fight Cancer, Alzheimer's, and more, with just your PC! https://pcmasterrace.org/folding
4 - This end of year, we're giving away a super high end PC, with an RTX5090 and 64 gigs of RAM, to a lucky winner. Also, cases up for grabs for 2 others! Enter here: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1pqtd4j/giveaway_its_holiday_time_comment_in_this_thread/
We have a Daily Simple Questions Megathread for any PC-related doubts. Feel free to ask there or create new posts in our subreddit!
Thank you, I was waiting for this.
There's still plenty of bloat in OP's PC.
Bill Gates said "640k ought to be enough for anybody, so give all the RAM to your AI-Bro overlords, you filthy peasants".
Apparently, he never said that, well the 640K part anyhow.
Don't spoil our fun. If we say he said it, then he said it.
MB
Megabyte?
Machobyte
Like a swol cenobite. but 8 times larger and focused on lifts.
My Byte. -Bill Gates, probably
urMommaByte
No, KB.
Another ManaBreak? Damnit!
https://preview.redd.it/43ap51e6az9g1.png?width=1536&format=png&auto=webp&s=8a80aabcaacc303ffb967ce5fa3bcec5d2085e4e
Did he or didnt he? We will never know, thanks AI bros.
https://preview.redd.it/ho78v3zz9z9g1.png?width=1536&format=png&auto=webp&s=c9302c26d3c85844e9d5a6b931fe9c032280d3a1
reality can be whatever i want
Impressive, but I doubt you can get it down to 1KB
Is that a threat?
Depends, does it work?
God, just making a boot disk and sequencing the tsr's in such a way for microprose games is such a pain, I'd hate to try and race to the bottom for that.
With QEMM386, conventional used memory could go down to 4KB.
It was just the structures and tables used to interact with DOS. All the system was in extended memory thanks to redirection by the paging unit.
Then you could add Desqview, and you could have a preemptive multitasking operating environment for DOS programs. You could have 520-600 KB of conventional memory per task, depending on your TSR and drivers.
It was impressive before Windows 3.
why do we need ram afterall, challenge now is 0kb !
If it was good enough for Apollo 11 it's good enough for you buddy
Why not try downloading some more RAM!
No way I'm installing that Windows bloatware!
https://preview.redd.it/fgxcnbhppt9g1.png?width=1440&format=png&auto=webp&s=f07d2796681ff8d5ca5f720b9ff5d48162d6070f
is this a joke or a real thing?
It is real.
how does it work?
You send me your RAM, and I send you double of that in return. The trustiest RAM doubling service!
double of your ram or mine ?
Yes.
uhhh idk just hurry up and send me your RAM
EVE Online is that you?
No.
But yes.
u/bunchofsugar i got a bunch of corpses, what do i do with them?
Is narcotics production a viable source of income or is it just a logistical nightmare?
My man has been selling this service at the Grand Exchange for years it seems so.
Trimming RAM 10k
Basically it just does Virtual Memory which was free and you can do in seconds. Allocate space on your SSD or back then HDD to act as RAM
so like page file?
IIRC it was Mac first and it used RAM compression.
And a 5s google, only used swap file when RAM was full.
RAM Doubler | Apple Wiki | Fandom
Bingo
virtual memory is seperate from paging/swapping to disk. it's just that swapping/paging is impossible without virtual memory.
and swap wasnt a novel technique, not even back then. i doubt thats what it did
it compressed and paged your ram to disk.
ironically one of the ways these apps did that was filling the ram, hence forcing the paging of more memory to disk, then releasing the ram. pages in virtual ram will only go back to ram if they are accesed. so in effect it freed your ram.
these came after the "boom" of disk doublers like stacker. that compressed and decompressed the data on the fly.
Memory compression. During this time memory compression wasn't a thing built into the operating systems. Doing memory compression in this factor was essentially trading CPU cycles for more memory however so it wasn't only upsides.
It was a real product that compressed memory contents, iirc
Ksm, uksm,
zswapzram all are things you can download to have more ram on linuxthat is just using your ssd as ram
ksm and uksm are kernel space merging, which deduplicates ram, so that if 2 chunks have the same contents, it stores one copy, and then a pointer to that copy
If something happens that would trigger a change to that memory, then it deduplicates the memory
It's intended use case is actually virtualization where you have tons of VMs with similar contents
Linux also has zram, which is entirely in memory. Basically it compresses and decompresses a portion of your RAM on the fly, effectively giving you more RAM in software. And it does that without ever touching your disk, unless it absolutely has to
Yeah... zram is what I intended to say, but my brain mixed zram and zswap
KSM still applies though
https://preview.redd.it/o1fkw1jjmx9g1.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=9392ee69a8e81cec94335c1ff5339b85b4874f95
Back in my days we had memmaker.
https://downloadmoreram.com/
Here is the link for anyone who wants too
You legit can download more ram on linux though
Ksm, uksm, and zswap are all downloadable ram expanders on linux that actually work
You named 3 programs and still missed Zram (ram based compressed swap)
You can download ksm, uksm, or zram to actually have more ram capacity on linux
You joke, but its real
not more capacity, reduced usage. ksm and uksm will share memory instead of duplicating it when possible (at a cpu cost, and security vulnerabilities). zswap is simply memory compression.
Your effective capacity is the amount of ram you can allocate without crashing or running out.
Application doesn't know the difference, it just sees it tried to allocate memory and it didn't crash
But if you want to be that obtuse, you could just download more virtual ram with swap on smb or nfs
capacity means the maximum amount of ram (available and unavailable). It is not obtuse to simply point this out. I'm sorry if it came off that way though. But your original comment was just... objectively incorrect. The three you listed are different than increasing capacity. That is all
Edit: I would also point out that neither swapping via smb nor nfs increase capacity either. Things like that can certainly trick the computer into thinking capacity has increased, but the cpu cost (and network overhead) when actually swapping renders this method unsatisfactory when compared to actually increasing capacity or reducing usage.
Comparing them doesn't really make sense when talking about the original subject. It is a poor stopgap until you can actually get more ram
I think you're missing the point entirely... there was a joke about downloading something, and suddenly you can functionally have more ram... People assumed that's impossible... but you can functionally do it, by improving efficiency with something you download
You are also thinking whitebox and not blackbox... this is about perspective.
Blackbox usage doesn't know how much ram you have. What matters is how much ram you can allocate without crashing.
If allocating 1 process uses 10MB of ram, and allocating 100 normally uses a gig of ram, and then you download something that runs in the background, that the processes can't see... and suddenly they can allocate 150, when they normally would crash at 100... the capacity for running those processes which requested 10MB of ram goes up.
That's a blackbox view of memory. It doesn't know how much you have, but it knows when it crashes from allocating too much.
Similarly, providing virtual memory would actually do the same thing. But local virtual memory is not something any reasonable person would perceive as downloading, so I suggested smb or nfs. It doesn't matter if it isn't practical, or if it has poor performance, the point is you can make a network connection, and suddenly can write, and subsequently read (which is then downloading over the network) something functioning as memory.
From a practical standpoint, if someone has an app that uses 10GB of ram, and you download some software, run it, and the same app is now using 1GB of ram, and it's done with a sha identical application with no userspace changes at all? I'm going to call that downloading more ram.
I think there's more bloatware. It's called BIOS.
Obviously, its right in the name! B.I.O.S.
Bloatware In Operating System.
Seriously. Everyone knows this.
You have won Reddit today, please accept this trophy 🏆
Have an upvote sir!
Long gone are the days of tweaking bios, just delete it!
The only real way is skipping the OS and writing BIOS applications directly!
https://youtu.be/ZFHnbozz7b4?si=1z1Wfq7PJdSbb-zx
https://preview.redd.it/89cwhk6u5u9g1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5dcbc57cb0d53add83ebef6186a759c3c12834ff
That's cool I guess. I'm currently rewriting my sound drivers on punch cards. Feels so good to be free from Micro$hit
Now that's hardcore, bonus points if you don't number the cards.
Hehe! Reminds me of DOS with it's 640kb limit.
OP literally has HIMEM.SYS loaded, which enables access to extended memory in excess of the first megabyte. Usable by famous DOS programs such as Warcraft II and Windows.
It was actually 1MB limit, 20 (21) bit far pointer supremacy!
Right the processor or whatever could only handle 1 mb
I did mention the one megabyte. The reason that DOS only had access to 640k easily was a convention where the other addresses weren't used for RAM, but instead for ROM or other shenanigans. While some motherboards could map some of the (relatively plentiful) memory from protected mode into that space, most could not. Meaning if you were coding for PC, you could rely on whatever DOS would spare you for the 640k, plus whatever you could use from extended or expanded, depending on how competent your compiler was.
Note that without far pointers, you could only address 64k; but this was not a problem on x86 normally, as pretty much everything had more RAM than that.
Yeah, but the memory is not correctly optimized. The more highly demanding games will not run, those want at least 620kb of conventional RAM to be present. You want to optimize your stack and buffers, and to use DEVICEHIGH and LOADHIGH in your config.sys and autoexec.bat respectively. If possible also switch to a command processor that can use high memory like 4DOS.
I mean generally each demanding program needed exactly its own special thing. If your game couldn't use extended memory, then you wouldn't have HIMEM.SYS. If it couldn't use expanded memory, then you wouldn't have EMM.SYS. If it didn't use a mouse, you wouldn't load the mouse driver for it. You would definitely never use SMARTDRV like he had there, that was a for like office programs or if you'd written a program that was processing data from the drive. If you had stuff you could load in high memory you sure would, but a lot of things wouldn't, and you were better off just only having exactly what you needed for a thirsty program.
There was this multiyear period where windows had access to effectively infinite RAM- like 8 megabytes or more- but doing anything in DOS was this incredible effort. But you needed DOS because Windows took a huge shit on your hardware and wouldn't let you touch it, nor would it correctly support the BIOS calls you needed. It was a very weird and stupid situation, and a solid argument that PCs sucked.
Nobody would ever need more
I’m surprised no one has mentioned QEMM yet. I think I might have bought my copy at Babbage’s
Huge! Arch has massive bloat ware you don’t need. I run a custom OS I vibe coded. Currently it uses around 2KB of RAM. Trying to get down to 1KB by next year. It benchmarks much faster than Arch as well. Was going to add support for a file system but it was pushing memory usage over 8KB and that’s just not worth it IMHO.
I uninstalled my OS and just stare at a blank screen honestly.
No boot device found has to be maybe 1kb or less, but if you hit enter it gives you multiple lines causing bloat
There's still a rogue electron somewhere in your system. You need to purge it.
"I run a custom OS I vibe coded."
I don't know how to react to this besides chuckling a bit
The benchmarking is actually just the OS printing benchmark scores.
print("Ram usage: 9 Bytes") print("Benchmarking complete ✅")Sounds about right
Is this r/pcmasterracecirclejerk?
you have a typo there. r/pcmasterraccirclejerk
Oh wow, that subreddit looks more pathetic that what it tries to criticize.
Dude is posting from one of the computer terminals in Fallout 3
That's perverse!
Pathetic. Threw my PC into the trash and got RAM usage down to 0.
Can I have your ram?
Finally a system that uses an appropriate amount of ram in these trying times.
Nobody ever needs more than 640kb of RAM! Get rid of that crappy himem.sys bloatware!
Great now do something with it
It runs Wing Commander I just fine tyvm.
Play Worms 1. Honestly fun.
I personally just stare at the Bios. Oses are too much bloat nowadays.
I just stare at the computer without powering it on. Bios costs electricity.
Bloatware(all gui stuff)
GUI? Hooey!
Sweet
https://preview.redd.it/oiwmls6u0u9g1.png?width=680&format=png&auto=webp&s=c3b42d90b1a53d2237b9bbf670091b0c8ab30816
https://hub.docker.com/_/alpine/tags
Rookie numbers, my system only uses 1KB of RAM /s
I use arch btw
u/gpkgpk : In config.sys, please put this line right after the line for himem.sys:
DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE V RAM
You'll be able to use DEVICEHIGH and LOADHI after that to move TSRs to upper memory blocks, freeing up a lot of conventional memory.
Good olde terminate stay resident exes, many a computer in the lab got random chars on screen due to my youthful shenanigans.
Who needs preemptive multitasking?
Not Mac OS up to and including 9.
dir /p
Me getting rid of the last megabyte of RAM useage.
Bloat.
The first computer I bought had 1kB ram. For another $99, I bumped that to 16kB.
ZX81 or TS1000? :3
1 MB in this economy?
Omores, is that you?
reasonable
Memmaker.exe
I feel like 1MB is still too much RAM. Have you tried 0MB RAM?
But can it run Crysis
So sick of Arch bloatware. Why do I need firmware for hardware that’s not even in my computer?
Things I do not miss.
You need to squeeze your soundblaster drivers in there though.
Get crazy and use Qemm And Magnaram
QEMM is still running permutations, I'll keep you posted.
Now that's a screen I haven't seen in a long time...a long time.
I just leave the ac cable unplugged .. 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% unbloated ram.. +/- global magneto resonance variable (Schumann Resonances)
Offer those free RAM space to AI companies, $10 per GB per hour.
One MEGAbyte? What the fuck are you doing with a MILLION bytes, these modern systems, pure consumism smh
Finally got rid of my pc and got ram usage to 0 kb
Fun fact: you can reduce RAM usage at idle to 0MB by running on bare metal.
You telling me a disk is operating this system?
Jokes aside, it really sucks we can’t just get a mainstream OS that is user friendly and not parted out to subscriptions and forced AI and insane privacy issues. It’s disappointing I can’t just buy tech than ow that tech in a society that as been ramming private property nonsense down my throat my entire life.
If you aren’t maxing out or using your ram, then it is indeed wasted ram.
and no obviously your ram shouldn’t always be maxed out, just use your ram
good now, keep it at 1MB for rest of the 2026 so you don't need to buy new rams. or actually can even sell them
OP is using more than double the claimed "down to 1mb" lie.
over 2mb of XMS in use!
Time to boot up the OG Morrowind and Doom(s) baby, gaming like it's the 80s!
I know it, other distro is full bloatware just like windows
Heh heh heh.
What games ya installing first
Jokes on you i have 0 Ram usage!
Just keeping the whole system unplugged.
Careful, you’re going to get a hot ear from all that extra horsepower!
You used MemMaker to fit the audio and joystick drivers, didn’t you. Wing Commander can be pretty demanding.
Rookie numbers, only 593KB of free RAM for programs. I’ve gotten my DOS all the way to 639KB 😎
it´s MicroSoft-DOS ...
Now lets see Paul Allens RAM usage
Rookie numbers. It took like 10KB of ram to get a man on the moon. What work do you have that needs more than that?
I just threw away all of my RAM, literally 0 MB usage, now Im typing from my phone.
Ram should always be 100% in use, otherwise it’s wasted money. File system cache, if nothing else.
Well served.
DOS has better fonts than Linux anyways.
Ah, the good old days of trying to eke out the few missing kb of conventional memory because the game you were trying to run didn't have an extender built in...
I love how this Subreddit is its own circlejerk
yeah if you reorder the files in the config.sys .. and use EMM386.sys you can go lower ;) how is your DOS experience
Bro why are you still using MS-DOS I get using XP but that is too old
The Linux (Arch btw) guy here.
Lmao 🤣
Sorry to ask a serious question in a meme thread but what exactly is the appeal of Arch? I only know of it from the (Arch btw) memes
My Personal Computer tells me it has 38911 bytes free when it boots up. Boot time is like 1s. Seems pretty solid to me!
https://preview.redd.it/49pns61xhz9g1.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=webp&s=950d9ca1b27509ed9e71b18fc22210f13ee75abc
Those are rookie numbers, you need to get that conventional memory above 604k if you want to be running falcon 3.0
640k should be enough for anybody!
Weak. Real arch geeks run it on 1KB
Can this also run 99% of games
Now you can sell the remaining amount of memory for profit.