🚀 go-pugleaf

Hunting the Snark (mars...@tfh.enet.dec.com) wrote:

: Just bought El-Fish (and love it) but having some trouble getting some of the
: fish to swim. Specifically the one named DRAGON (shipped as roe). This is a
: particulary big fish (128 x 128) and I cannot get it to enter the aquarium. I
: have a 386/25 with 4 Meg of memory and a coprocessor. I've taken everything out
: of the aquarium and populated it with just one of these fish and it still won't
: swim. I've got 512K conventional memory free before running El-Fish. Is there
: anyone who has had El-Fish long enough to experience this problem and found a
: solution?

This is a pretty common problem. El-Fish runs in DOS protected mode using a 
DOS extender. It does this because it need 4MB to run. If you don't have 4MB 
free, you won't be able to load the larger fish into your aquariums. So, 
you'll need to make sure that there are no other programs in memory that use 
the area above 1MB for storage. The most common programs that do this are 
EMM386 when configured to use expanded memory and SmartDrive (or any other 
disk cacheing software for that matter). 

So, you may ask, how do you get rid of these programs? Well, one way is to 
take a look at the addendum that comes with El-Fish and follow the procedure 
for making a boot disk. The boot disk described in the addendum is the optimum 
configuration for El-Fish. If you have DOS 6 an alternative would be to hit F5 
when you re-boot and see the "Starting MS-DOS..." message. This will bypass 
you config.sys and autoexec.bat. You'll need to remember to load your mouse 
drive manually if you do this, though! If you have a bit more initiative, you 
could create a bear bones configuration for your system under the DOS 6 
multi-configuration boot, or find one of those shareware configuration 
selecttion programs if you have DOS 5.

El-Fish lives!

-Chris

: Thanks,

: Steve 
: Marshall

: (hoping to see some cool el-fish roe being posted in the near future)