First I want to make clear that I know very little about how computers work, I just read and try things hoping to learn more and more each day.
I'm creating a "revolutionary" approach for an old Pentium 166Mhz.
The idea is to run everything from a USB stick (system and games). The motherboard lacks any USB connectivity (Hsing Tech 519 v1.0) so I'm using a VIA 6202 based PCI USB 2.0 card.
It works great with Bret's driver, but a little slow to run everything fine. For instance, to run doom fast enough I use a ramdisk.
If I want to mount an iso with shsucdhd/shsucdx and run a game (in this case Dune), it just doesn't read the USB stick fast enough, so it is hardly playable
By the way, I'm using usbuhcil.com index 1, usbdrive.com /x:64
I add the x:64 to improve speed and it does improve, but it is not 64 times faster than the default value (1).
So I resorted to use the proprietary USB driver usbmass.exe, and although I experience some hangs from time to time, it loads way faster, and the game animations run smooth BUT this game requires EMS memory for sound, and when I load emm386.exe, the driver doesn't work properly. If I do
c:\> dir
All I see is "IO.SYS" and nothing else.
So I guess this has to do with emm386 and how it is using some part of the memory that usbmass.exe needs. I was trying many configurations but although I read a lot and tried a lot, I'm a complete ignorant of how to finetune emm and assign "parts" of the memory.
By the way, the usbmass.exe allows one to define the start address of i/o pool and the start address of memory pool, the help page says:
/io:n start address of I/O pool (default 0x00002000)
/M:n start address of memory pool (default 0x000D0000)
Since you are very knowledgeable in this, would you please help me figure out what parameters for emm386 I should set, or for usbmass.exe to overcome this?
Thank you in advance!