A very useful Microsoft help file is here:
"Cannot Configure Expanded Memory Support for an MS-DOS-Based Program"
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q275423/

http://home.earthlink.net/~infernosadventures/configuringdosemulation.htm (Thanks to Richard Finney for this suggestion which, he says, is better than most for novices.)

Or if all else fails in Windows Me:
www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/emswinme.html

Or within this FAQ page:
Expanded Memory Proiblems

FAQ3
Recorder 3.x generally works without problems with Windows XP, and there are no known problems when upgrading to XP Service Pack 2 whcih was issued in autumn 2004.

Stuart Ball of JNCC has kindly provided the following guidance for running RECORDER 3 in Windows XP. These help you make sensible adjustments to the Properties Tab of the icon used to launch Recorder, or to enable Expanded Memory.

"I have been asked rather frequently lately about running Recorder 3 on Windows XP. I have XP Home Edition on my computer at home and find Rec3 runs very well. The way I set it up was as follows
(NOTE: These instructions also apply to Windows 2000):

1. Starting in Windows, go to your \Recorder\Arev3 directory ((using My Computer or Explorer) and right-click on AREV.EXE

2. Choose "Send to Desktop (Create shortcut)" from the menu.

3. You should now see a new icon appear on your desktop which will be labelled "Shortcut to AREV.EXE" and will probably have an Arev icon (Blue and white clouds with a yellow lightning flash). Right-click this new desktop icon and choose "Properties" from the menu.

4. The properties will open with its "General" tab selected. You may want to change the name of the shortcut whilst you are here (e.g. to "Recorder 3") - just edit the text in the box at the top.

5. Now choose the "Program" tab. It has a box labelled "Cmd line:" which will contain something like "C:\Recorder\Arev3\AREV.EXE". Add the following command line switches to the end of the line:
   ...\AREV.EXE , /x m4096 (i.e. you need to add " , /x m4096" to the end of the existing line)
The "4096" is the number of kb of Expanded memory you are asking for. You can choose what you like here, but 4096 is a reasonable value. The comma tells AREV to prompt for a user name during startup. If one person only uses Recorder 3 on the machine, you could put their user name instead: ...\AREV.EXE SGB /x m4096
In this case, Rec3 will login as user "SGB" without further ado (you will still get prompted for a password if yours is set). You can also change the icon from here if you like - just click the [Change Icon] button and choose one you like.

6. Now choose the "Memory" tab. Change the "Expanded (EMS) memory" entry to 4096 (or whatever value you typed after the "m" in 5) and the ""Extended (XMS) memory" to "None". Make sure the "Uses HMA" checkbox is ticked ((it should be already).

7. Now choose the "Misc" tab. You may want to un-tick the "Always suspend" tick-box. If you de-select this option, it will allow Rec3 to run in background mode when it is minimised so that you can work in other Windows programs whilst it is gets on with long operations in the background. If you leave this option ticked, Rec3 will be suspended whilst it is minimised and Rec3 won't do anything if you leave it running and switch to another program.

8. Now choose the "Screen" tab and select "Full-screen".

9. Now click the [OK] button to save the changes you have made to the properties.

10. Double-click the new desktop icon and Rec3 should start. You will probably find that the image only occupies the top half of the full-screen DOS box and that the bottom half is black. To fix this, select "Utilities -Environment - Hardware - Display - Environment" from the main menu. In the window that opens, the top prompt "Video Display Mode" will be blank. Press [F2] and select "DEFAULT" from the popup. Save the settings by pressing [F9].

11. Quit out of Recorder by pressing [Esc] until you get back to the main menu, and the select Quit.

12. Restart Rec3 by double-clicking the icon again. The initial startup screen may still only occupy the top half of the screen, but once Rec3 is running, it should now occupy the whole screen and display properly. Finally, you can select "Help - System Info" from the menus and look at the "Expanded memory" setting. It should say "Active". If it doesn't, your DOS setup is not allowing expanded memory - which seems to happen on some specific machines (like my machine at JNCC!) and I have been unable so far to work out how to change this. Anyway, Rec3 should run OK without expanded memory, so don't worry if this happens to you.

Stuart Ball

Important Note:
Whilst Expanded Memory is not essential to run Recorder, it MUST be active to run the update of Rec 3.2 to 3.3 (supplied on 3 disks in 1997). Without it the AREV directory will be corrupted and will need to be restored from a backup You may be advised to ensure you have at least upgraded to Rec version 3.3 prior to running in Windows XP as some users report intractable problems in activating expanded memory in Windows XP, whilst others have no difficulty at all - see below.  Copies of these upgrade disks are still available. See FAQ2

If all you want to do is simply copy your installation of RECORDER from one PC to another, you do not need to go through the installation process. Simply copy all relevant RECORDER and AREV directories and subdirectories from one C: drive to another.

Expanded Memory Problems
If you have encountered difficulty in activating Expanded Memory in Windows XP, you are not alone. Even users like Stuart Ball (who developed RECORDER 3) have had difficulty on some individual PCs. Stuart has provided the following account of his experiences: These are foillowed by some notes relevant to problems experiened by Windows ME users.

"....both Sally Rankin and I have had intractable problems with giving Arev Expanded Memory on some machines under Win2000/XP. Normally everything works fine. You set up the shortcut to allocate expanded memory and put "/x" on the Arev.exe command line and expanded memory will be enabled (see the FAQ about Rec3 under Win2000/XP).

However, on my machine at work (running Win2000 Pro) and Sally Rankin's laptop (XP) EMM will not enable whatever we have tried. However, other people's apparently identical machines at JNCC do enable EMM and so does Sally's desk top machine with the same software. It therefore seems to be a machine specific thing rather than anything to do with the operating system.

At JNCC we called this in as an incident with Microsoft support and pursued it for some time, but with no success.

NT based systems (Windows NT/2000/XP) get their DOS configuration information from files called AUTOEXEC.NT and CONFIG.NT which are in the c:\winnt\system32 directory. If you open CONFIG.NT in Notepad you will see screeds of comments explaining the parameters, but the bottom line is that the working bit should look like:

dos=high, umb
devicehigh=%SystemRoot%\system32\himem.sys
EMM = RAM
files=40

Then, if your shortcut to the DOS program (pif file) asks for EMM, it should get it - and usually it does.

I have from time to time spent spare moments browsing the web to try and find out why it won't work for me (I know ... I am a sad techie and should get out more). I finally found something that looks like a plausible
explanation. It runs as follows:

- DOS can only address 1Mb (1024kb) of memory.
- The first 640kb is what it uses as the normal workspace for programs and data, the rest ("upper memory") is used for special purposes.
- DOS Memory is organised into 64kb segments and all addresses in DOS are stored in two parts: the segment address and then the byte within that segment ("offset"). This is the fundermental basis of Arev's 64kb
restrictions. So everything works around 64kb chunks of memory.
- Expanded memory works by reserving a 64kb "page frame" in the upper memory area. This is used to swap 64kb blocks of data in and out of the extra memory installed on the machine which DOS cannot "see". SO DOS reads or writes to the page frame and the expanded memory manager handles the job of moving the contents of the page fram backwards and forwards from the rest of the machine's memory.
- Upper memory is also used by DOS to communicate with all sorts of hardware. Any hardware device that does input and output (serial and parallel ports, video cards, sound cards, USB, scanners, etc) tend to use an
area of upper memory to communicate with DOS. So, for example, if data is written by DOS to the special area reserved by a video card, then the card "knows" it is has to show that information on the screen.
- A problem arises if, after memory areas have been allocated to all these devices, there is no contiguous 64kb block of upper memory left which the EMM manager can use for its page frame. If this is the case then you don't get any EMM.

This sounds plausible because it explains why some machines give EMM to Arev whilst other very similar ones don't. They just have slightly different hardware, or the memory addresses which their hardware is configured to use differ slightly.

This is all very well, but what can you do about it?

Well, theoretically you could go into the Windows Device Manager and turn off any device that is not absolutely crucial to run the machine. Do a restart and see if Arev now has EMM. If it has, then it is a memory conflict
with one or more of the disabled devices that is causing the problem.

Next you turn the devices back on one by one. After enabling each one, restart and check again. Hopefully, you will get to a position where turning a specific device on disables EMM and turning it off again re-enables it.

If you can identify the conflicting device, you might be able to do something about it. Many devices have options to use a range of different memory addresses and it may be possible to change the setting in Device Manager in the hope of finding an alternative that doesn't conflict with EMM.

This sort of investigation is not for the faint hearted and needs a lot of time and patience and I haven't attempted it on my machine at work yet (assuming our system manager would let me!)"

Stuart Ball
 

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