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Gold Medal Software - Volume 5 (Gold Medal) (1995).iso
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RUNNING ALM OPTIMALLY UNDER OS/2 2.x
ALM will work well in a default OS/2 MDOS session. However, for those
interested in tweaking their system in order to obtain the maximum
efficiency in terms of memory usage and system responsiveness, please
follow these instructions:
∙ Open the Templates Folder, then drag a Program Template from the
Templates Folder to the Desktop (or another desired folder) - this
action will make a copy of a "blank" Program Template which you
will use to setup ALM.
∙ Type the full path specification and file name in the "Path and
file name" entry, and enter the path in which ALM.EXE resides in
the "Working directory" entry.
∙ Click on the Session tab. At this point, you may either setup ALM
as a full-screen (occupies the entire screen, in text mode) or
windowed (runs in a window on the Desktop) session by selecting the
"DOS full screen" or "DOS window" toggles, respectively.
∙ Click on the "DOS settings" button. At this point, there are a
number of settings that you may change (for ON/OFF toggles, OS/2's
default value is indicated by CAPS, while for those fields which
accept a number, that number is given in parentheses):
Memory related options
Generally, ALM works best with as much DOS-addressable memory
as you can give it. The following OS/2 MDOS settings affect
the amount of memory OS/2 gives an MDOS session:
∙ DOS_HIGH (on/OFF): Set this to ON. Setting DOS High gives
programs (e.g., ALM) more memory with which to operate.
∙ DOS_RMSIZE (640): Leave this value at OS/2's default, 640k.
See VIDEO_MODE_RESTRICTION below for a related setting.
However, if you have a minimal system (i.e., one that is
short on RAM) you may want to run ALM with a lesser amount
of RAM. ALM requires a minimum of 256k RAM, so, if
necessary, you may set DOS_RMSIZE to 256.
∙ VIDEO_MODE_RESTRICTION (NONE/cga/mono): As stated earlier,
ALM works best with as much memory as possible. OS/2
allows you to restrict a given DOS session's video access
to CGA only, and therefore frees up an addition 64k of
DOS-addressable RAM which can be used by ALM. However, due
to a small bug in OS/2, you also need to set DOS_RMSIZE to
639k (NOT 640k) for this feature to work.
∙ DOS_UMB (on/OFF): Related to the above, if you are loading
any device drivers in ALM's session, it is recommended to
set DOS_UMB ON, as this will maximize the amount of
DOS-addressable memory available to ALM.
∙ EMS_MEMORY LIMIT (2048): OS/2 defaults to 2MB for this
field. ALM uses a maximum of 384k of EMS memory, and only
uses EMS if it does not find enough available XMS memory;
therefore, you can minimize the amount of memory used by
the ALM session by adjusting this value downwards to 0 if
you have at least 375k of XMS memory, or to 384k if you are
short on available XMS memory.
For a RAM-minimal system, you may set this to 0.
∙ XMS_HANDLES (32): Set this to 16.
∙ XMS_MEMORY_LIMIT (2048): OS/2 defaults to 2MB for this
field. ALM uses a maximum of 375k of XMS memory;
therefore, you can minimize the amount of memory used by
the ALM session (and therefore make more memory available
for other sessions) by adjusting this value downwards to
375k.
For RAM-minimal systems, you may set both XMS_HANDLES
XMS_MEMORY_LIMIT to 0.
Peformance related options
∙ DOS_BACKGROUND_EXECUTION (ON/off): If you wish ALM to
operate in the background, leave this value set to on.
It bears noting that ALM will, when idle, give up its
time-slice to OS/2, so this setting is not critical to the
execution speed of other concurrently-running programs.
Also, if you are running on a (relatively) slow CPU, you
may decide to set DOS_BACKGROUND execution to OFF so as to
give the foreground process as much CPU time as possible.