Paul: Thanks all your for your help and comments. All of this talk of MS-DOS finally reawakened some of my dormant ageing brain-cells and I started to remember those long forgotten DOS utilities that I used in the early days of DOS and Windows 3.xx. Remember all the "tweaking" and messing around we went through to squeeze that last ounce of RAM out of DOS? Do any of you remember all that re-arranging and tweaking the way DOS loaded itself and all the TSRs we needed to run our systems? The DOS utility tool called Memmaker.exe is essential for tweaking your initial Win98/DOS 7.01 environment. It's actually a DOS 6.22 tool, but it works fine in DOS 7.01. It's found in a Microsoft archive called "olddos.exe", which contains Memmaker.exe, its support files, plus a few other "oldie but goodie" DOS relics that make life with DOS a little easier. It's clumsy & kludgey, like everything that MS makes, but it does work and give you an excellent "Non-GUI" DOS working environment for Fractint. Now that my "DOS era" brain cells have been re-awakened, do any of you remember QEMM? The reason is because that QEMM supports a DPMI environment which some Fractint Gurus have told me makes Fractint really sizzle! One of the things that has really improved my Fractint and Fractint *.bat file performance 10 fold is my loading "SMARTDRV.EXE"! Since I've installed "smartie" onto my DOS 7.01 system, there isn't any "slow down" of fractint whn doing large animation batch files. SMARTDRV was one of those venerable DOS & Win 3.xx "utilities" that somehow disappeared from my system when I upgraded to Win95/98/ME! SMARTDRV needs to be carefully tweaked which is why alot of people gave up on it when "upgrading" to Win95b/Win98 double buffers and vcache. Fractint is now Zipping along rendering away files as fast as Ultra fractal! Using a Fractint, PAR, and BAT combo I rendered 4,000 image files without that horrible "slowdown" that seems to plague large Fractint BAT renders. I'm now using a multi-boot menu config.sys & autoexec.bat, that allows me the choice to either boot to Win98, or boot to a nice "NOEMS" XMS only environment for Fractint, and several other test environments, including a RAMDRIVE environment suggested by Jim Muth. This config.sys just makes things a little "neater" than my earlier "kludges" of different boot floppies, even though I had even been experimenting with a multiboot menu boot floppy which also seemed to work just fine. I had posted an earlier version of my multiboot menu config.sys, and autoexec.bat onto this e-group in an earlier post, but if anyone wants it, I'll post it again. A lot of this is really ancient stuff, which most of you Fractint Gurus have probably already figured all of this stuff out at least a decade ago, but I'd like know how any of you fellow amnesiacs & "Fractalieri" have fared with your own efforts at DOS tweaking. Here's the ftp type download address for olddos.exe. ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/Softlib/mslfiles/olddos.exe All the best, Tony ----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul N. Lee" <Paul.N.Lee@Worldnet.att.net> To: <fractint@mailman.xmission.com> Sent: Friday, November 15, 2002 9:09 PM Subject: Re: [Fractint] Problems Using Fractint With Bat Files In Win98 Dos Box.
Tony Parker wrote:
....I've noticed that when I gnerating large batches of several thpousand images with fractint, the batch processing starts off pretty smooth and quick but, as the job progresses the batch processing gets slower and slower.
Besides the "Idle Sensitivity", which specifies how long Windows will allow the program to remain idle (waiting for keyboard input) before reducing the central processing unit (CPU) resources allotted to the program and enabling other programs to use them. Low idle sensitivity lets the program run longer before Windows reduces the CPU resources allotted to it. High idle sensitivity reduces the CPU resources allotted to the program sooner. If a program that is running in the background is not getting enough CPU resources, move the slider toward LOW.
You might also look into the "Dynamic Memory Allocation" setting. Make sure this check box is selected when a program uses text and graphic modes and you want to maximize the amount of memory available to other programs when the program is running. When you switch to the mode requiring less memory, Windows makes more memory available to other programs. When you switch back to the mode requiring more memory, Windows attempts to provide the memory. To ensure that there is always enough memory for Windows to correctly display the program in any mode, clear the check box.
You may wish to look into some of the FREEWARE products that do memory management, such as "RAM Idle". Use it to free up a selected amount of physical memory when the minimum level is reached. You can also use it to free up a selected amount of physical memory at a regular interval, and free up the physical memory manually as needed.
Sincerely, P.N.L. ------------------------------------------------- http://home.att.net/~Paul.N.Lee/PNL_Fractals.html
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