DOS/4GW
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
DOS/4GW was the most widely used 32-bit DOS extender, designed to allow DOS programs to eliminate the inherent DOS 640 KiB memory limit by addressing up to 32 MB of extended memory on Intel 80386 and above machines in MS-DOS, PC-DOS, DR-DOS, the DOS boxes of OS/2, Windows, Windows NT and Windows 95 and other DOS clones, and even DOS emulators like DOSBox. It was developed by Tenberry Software as a subset of DOS/4G and was distributed with the Watcom C compiler.
Functioning as a highly flexible and reuseable memory extension library it allowed programmers to easily access extended memory without programming specialized code. It was made widely popular by computer games like Doom.
Despite its big popularity in the past, it is not very efficient nor very mature. The extender size of DOS/4GW standard version (now somewhat "free") is almost 300 KB. The development of DOS/4GW ended in 1995, however after this date many other extenders were developed, some of them designed as drop-in replacement for DOS/4GW, like PMODE/W, CauseWay, WDOSX, and DOS/32A.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- DOS/4GW FAQ
- DOS/32 Advanced DOS Extender an open source drop-in replacement for DOS/4GW
