You mentioned EMS that's why I brought it up. On a 286 sure you can go to protected mode but AFAIK that tended to be more involved than most people would like.

You mentioned EMS that's why I brought it up. On a 286 sure you can go to protected mode but AFAIK that tended to be more involved than most people would like. In the case of XMS, that could help but still requires moving data to/from EMB. Frankly EMS would be the best option to keep it workable on an 8088. At the very least the 64k frames could be used for some of the data that I'm guessing are streamed (belched?) from disk.