3 ms·
There's a thing I've been curious about for a while, might as well try and ask here. What does "DEVICE=" in config.sys actually do? As in, why is this in confi
by dale_glass 2y ago
There's a thing I've been curious about for a while, might as well try and ask here.
What does "DEVICE=" in config.sys actually do? As in, why is this in config.sys:
device=c:\dos\emm386.exe
and not just:
c:\dos\emm386.exe
in autoexec.bat?
- lproven 2y agoThe DEVICE line loads device drivers. EMM386 is a device driver which needs to be started very early in the DOS boot process for it to work -- because most of the rest of DOS is then loaded into memory blocks that EMM386 provides. It's an .EXE file because the command invocation gives some useful data -- but it can't load that way, and if it could it would be useless because then it was too late to load drivers into the memory regions it created.