wine users - Mar 2008 - Can I define how much free memory is reported to an app?

Hi

Sorry if this is a simple question, I haven't been able to find this out by
myself!

I'm trying to run an old application that I wrote under Visual BASIC 4.0
many years ago, however I am encountering the same problem under Wine that I
find under modern XP: while trying to open the database I receive a 2004: Out of
Memory error.

It appears that this problem is actually due to an over-abundance of memory, and
that the old DAO3032.DLL probably returnes RAM values around the 1 GB range or
more, as negative numbers.

Porting to VB 6 is out of the question at the moment, so I am wondering if there
is some switch or registry key which would allow me to tell Wine to report LESS
available system RAM than is actually available.

Any suggestions welcome

Paul Cull

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 3:26 AM, pcull <wineforum-user at winehq.org>
wrote:
>  I'm trying to run an old application that I wrote under
> Visual BASIC 4.0 many years ago, however I am encountering
>  the same problem under Wine that I find under modern XP:
> while trying to open the database I receive a 2004: Out of Memory error.
>
>  It appears that this problem is actually due to an over-abundance
> of memory, and that the old DAO3032.DLL probably returnes
> RAM values around the 1 GB range or more, as negative numbers.
Can you write a tiny demo program that exposes the
problem, and post source and binaries?
That would make it easier for us to help.
- Dan

pcull wrote:
> Porting to VB 6 is out of the question at the moment, so I am wondering if
there is some switch or registry key which would allow me to tell Wine to report
LESS available system RAM than is actually available.
No there isn't one. And if this program fails on WinXP the same way it would
be hard to convince Alexandre to "fix" this.

However I think having a list of app compatibility settings in winecfg might not
be such a bad idea. Along the lines of winversion.

Markus Hitter wrote:
> As it works on Win95, a RAM < 2 GiB assumption could/should be built  
> into the Win95 compatibility setting.
I doubt this is the case here. I think Wine does return correct values in win9x
mode. However it still might be too big here.

Yes, I suspect that, although we seen to have true compatibility with Win 9x,
the fact is that some programs (such as the MSJet 3 engine used for Visual BASIC
4) are not compatible with the large amounts of RAM available to us these days.
Of course, the same thing can happen with modern disk capacities, which return
negative numbers of free space.

If it were possible to implement tunable limits for reported RAM (and/or disk
space) when running under Win 9x compatibility, I believe this would allow more
of these old programs under Wine.

Paul

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 3:24 PM, pcull <wineforum-user at winehq.org>
wrote:
> the same thing can happen with modern disk capacities, which return
negative numbers of free space.
Yeah, I fixed a bug like that in disk space reported
to MS-DOS / win16 apps a couple years ago.

Once we have a bona fide repeatable problem in
the hands of a wine developer, we can look
at fixing the cap on memory reported to old apps, too.

For what it's worth here's an MS Knowledge Base article about the
problems of having too much memory:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q253912

Here Microsoft define a large amount of memory as being over 512 megabytes, and
one of their solution is to physically remove memory!

I suspect that if Wine included the ability to cap reported system memory under
Win9x that it could become a useful alternative for people needing to run old
legacy applications under modern hardware!

Paul

Hi

At the moment I'm on one side of the planet (New Zealand) and VB 4.0
compiler is on the other side (Brazil) so I can't prepare a sample project.
I suspect that anything in VB that tries to open an MSJet database file would
cause this problem.

However, I can send you both the source and a zip of the application itself,
which is a Bible concordance program, with both English and Portuguese versions.
A zip file of the object code with all necessary databases  can be found here:
(14 megabytes) http://www.avivamentoja.org/download/verbo17.zip

I'll gladly send source code or anything else that would help, just let me
know where to send it to.

Regards

Paul

Cool. If it doesn't run, you'll get a pop-up with the error message
2004: Out of memory while still on the splash-screen. If you can get to the main
menu, it's running ok!

Paul