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CHIPSET.DOC
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1991-01-18
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CHIPSET.EXE is a small program that simply checks to see if your PC
has one of the memory controllers required to use The Last Byte
memory manager.
To see if your PC has one of the supported memory controllers,
simply enter the following command at the DOS prompt:
A>CHIPSET
CHIPSET will identify the particular memory controller you have, if
any. If it says you do have a suitable controller, but you also get
the message:
"Shadow Ram is disabled/relocated - Change Setup"
This simply means that something is preventing the shadow ram you
have from being used. You may need to make a change to the BIOS
SETUP, or you may have to move a jumper on the motherboard. Before
attempting to do either, be sure to consult the documentation that
came with your computer, and look in it for a discussion of shadow
ram options.
To see the entire list of what devices The Last Byte supports, add a
question mark to the command line, as in:
A>CHIPSET ?
If your PC has one of these devices, then The Last Byte (tm) memory
manager will work on your PC, and you will be able to load device
drivers, TSRs, DOS buffers and more into upper memory above 640k.
If your PC uses another kind of chipset, it may not be supported for
one of the following reasons:
(1) No shadow ram hardware:
---------------------------
Some of the early motherboard chipsets do not provide shadow
ram support.
Examples: VLSI Technologies 82C100 series
Western Digital chipsets
Texas Instruments 82000 series
Early Suntac chipsets (ST62BC001-6)
(2) No shadow ram read/write mode:
----------------------------------
Some chipsets have shadow ram, but it can only be put into
either write-only mode (for copying rom contents to ram), or
read-only mode (to prevent accidental writes into what's
supposed to be a copy of rom).
Examples: ACC Microelectronics chipsets
Headland Technologies chipsets
G2 chipsets
(3) DMA (Direct Memory Access) can't get to the shadow ram:
-----------------------------------------------------------
Many device drivers and TSRs use either use DMA directly, or
else they employ disk buffers that DOS accesses via DMA.
The hardware design of some memory controller chips prevent
DMA from accessing the shadow ram, and thus loading this kind
of software into shadow ram memory is pointless.
Examples: VLSI Technologies VL82C286 & VL82C386 TOPCAT
(4) Controller architecture incompatible with design of The Last Byte:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The Last Byte is table-driven, making it relatively easy to
adapt to different memory controller architectures, but there
are limits!
Examples: Zymos chipsets
(5) Shadow ram control can be made inaccessible once configured:
----------------------------------------------------------------
Some controllers are designed so that they can be "locked"
at the end of software initialization, requiring a hardware
reset to unlock, and thus preventing The Last Byte from
accessing the controller.
Example: Intel 82335, 82335SX
Some of these chips, however, have hardware support for LIM 4.0 EMS,
and thus many of their motherboards come with a EMS device driver
designed specifically to take advantage of this capability. So in
many cases, you can install this driver first, and then The Last Byte
can use it to manage upper memory.
A free demo version of The Last Byte may be downloaded using the
filename TLB-Vnnn.ZIP, where the "nnn" is replaced by the latest
version number. The demo version is fully functional except that it
limits you to 32k of memory and no more than two device drivers
and/or TSRs loaded into upper memory. If you can't find a copy of
The Last Byte, contact us and we'll be happy to send you a copy.
Key Software Products
440 Ninth Avenue
Menlo Park, CA 94025
(415) 364-9847