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A comment on The -a to -z of Command-Line Options (2003). Parent comment

Re:The -a to -z of Command-Line Options (2003) by laumars on Monday December 10, 2018 @03:03PM (#18650768)
I don’t think you’d need to reboot to take advantage of that because they’re loaded as part of Windows booting and then a lot of the DOS kernel was patched into the Windows kernel for 16bit driver support.

I certainly don’t recall ever having any issues with 16 bit games (aside my weird soundcard not working with half the games I tried, but I can’t recall why that was off hand).

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Re:The -a to -z of Command-Line Options (2003) by int_19h on Monday December 10, 2018 @09:16PM (#18652854)
It's not a 16-bit driver issue; it's the conventional memory size issue. Remember the old 640 Kb limit? When you had too many DOS drivers loaded, you often ended up with less than 600 Kb free - and some 16-bit games didn't like running that low, hence the need to use HIMEM etc. And while it still works when running DOS apps from Windows, it reduced the amount of conventional memory even further.
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Re:The -a to -z of Command-Line Options (2003) by laumars on Tuesday December 11, 2018 @12:40PM (#18657037)
Yes, I understand the problem but what I’m saying is when you shutdown to DOS (even without rebooting) win.com was shutoff. Since it was win.com that disabled EMM386 you were free to run your HIMEM whatever again. Thus having a full DOS environment without a full reboot (which used to be slow in those days).

Thinking about it some more, I think I might have had a subset autoexec.bat I used to run for those occasions.

That technique seemed to work for me. Maybe I’m forgetting a tonne of 16 bit games that didn’t play but nothing immediately springs to mind

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Re:The -a to -z of Command-Line Options (2003) by int_19h on Tuesday December 11, 2018 @03:33PM (#18658602)
EMM386 was usually run from autoexec.bat. But HIMEM was a driver installed via config.sys. I think there were some complications with the latter with "reboot to DOS".
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