Beyond the 1 MB barrier in DOS

Last month, we covered Julio Merino's article about going from 0 to 1 MB in DOS, and now they're back for breaking beyond that 1 MB barrier.

I know I promised that this follow-up article would be about DJGPP, but before getting into that review, I realized I had to take another detour to cover three more topics. Namely: unreal mode, which I intentionally ignored to not derail the post; LOADALL, which I didn't know about until you readers mentioned it; and DOS extenders, which I was planning to describe in the DJGPP article but they are a better fit for this one.

So... strap your seat belts on and dive right in for another tour through the ancient techniques that DOS had to pull off to peek into the memory address space above the first MB. And get your hands ready because we'll go over assembly code for a step-by-step jump into unreal mode.

Julio Merino

What's amazing is that I don't even remember having to deal with any of this while using MS-DOS back in the day. Games tended to use DOS extenders automatically (DOS/4G!), but I don't remember if I ever had to set up any of the DOS above-640k stuff manually.