A20 access error by himem.sys on A7V880

I'd like to set up my PC like I did my old one just now. My old KT7A now has 98SE set up with the last SBLive vxd's that came with the dos mode driver. It's great with 601K memory available in dos mode even with the soundcard, cdrom, mouse, smartdrive, MSCDEX all loaded. 98 runs great with all the updates on the MSFN forums (98SESP2.0RC3, 98SE2ME).

The trouble is on my ASUS A7V880 for some reason himem.sys will report that it cannot access A20. WindowsXP or Windows98SE run fine, but dos mode is fubarred by this, as EMM386 leaves me a tiny amount of conventional memory (like around 480K, I forgot exactly). Dosbox'll work fine as it is running its own PC in there, but I can do that with XP! The whole point is to run a few games at their best, which for some games won't happen with Dosbox until someone invents a 10,000GHz processor it seems. (Games like Star Trek TNG A Final Unity, Tomb Raider 1, etc.) 98 in dos mode, or with a selective startup even the dosprompt in 98, runs this stuff great. And since the only games later than about 2000 that I own are the Baseball Mogul series, I'm really better off with 98's compatibility with all my older stuff. (Someone stop me from changing my mind about this every few days!)

Anyway, doing some research, I found that most references to the A20 line error refer to Windows 3.1 days when sometimes older machine's keyboard access wouldn't be read correctly by himem.sys. So one would need to specify either what machine himem was accessing (M:1 AT, M:2 PS2, M:11 alternate PC/AT, etc), or specify A20Control:On (which it is by default-don't see how that'll help).

Why in the world would a newer motherboard have a problem like this? It is interesting that ASUS lists only Windows98SE, Me, 2000, XP as compatible. Do you think this is because the board maps memory differently so all the on-board devices (ethernet, audio, SATA boot-rom) will run?

I was using a SATA drive with the SATA boot-rom enabled. Do you think using an IDE HD instead, with the SATA boot-rom disabled, would change anything? How about using all PCI ethernet, audio, so I would disable all the on-board stuff in the BIOS? Would this return things to normal? Or is this now the new way to make motherboards, without compatiblility with old memory routines of himem.sys, which are no longer necessary?

Edit: I've sent ASUS a problem description. Last time I got no response but an auto-reply. We'll see.

 

Yes, the A20 information is the kind of thing I've seen posted elsewhere. But, do you see the operating systems both articles are referring to? I mean, should this kind of thing be happening on a shiny new motherboard (all right, a couple of month's old now)? And, on Windows 98SE?

Even using a boot disc brings up the A20 line. This includes dos boot disks made by XP, 98SE, sys'd from the command line, and Windows 98SE Startup disks.

 

Asus replyed back to me with a list of things to do to install Windows clean.

Don't they read?

Anyway, all tinkering failed. The system will run 98 perfectly if I do not add the famous dos lines to the config files. But if I include himem.sys, emm386, and dos=high,umb the system will not make it to Windows. (It'll shut down, telling me to remove extraneous drivers from my config files.)

Without that, however, dos 7.1 is unusable except for emergency maintenance.

So, I'll use the A7V880 as my main machine with XP, and the KT7A for backup. I'd actually rather do the opposite, but the processor speed difference is too much in my video editing for me to use the older machine.

If I knew about this I wouldn't have bought the board. The manual states compatiblity with Windows 98SE, Me, 2000, XP. It does not say that 98 dos is crippled.