Hot on the heels of Softguard’s announcement of its DOS 386 Tool Kit (CI No 632), Phoenix Technologies Ltd has introduced Control/386, described by the Norwood, Massachusetts company as a systems software product that enables designers of 80386 machines to deliver much more of the potential performance of the 32-bit chip to users of existing MS-DOS applications. Key to boosting performance is Control/386’s ability to set up areas in main memory to compensate for some of the slower physical devices, such as disk drives and EPROMs; 32-bit main memory can be used for caching to improve the performance of disk-intensive applications and BIOS and Extended Graphics Adaptor performance is improved by copying code from slower ROMs into fast 32-bit extended memory RAM. Control/386 also provides 32-bit emulation of AST Research’s Enhanced Expanded Memory Specification and the Lotus/Intel/Microsoft Expanded Memory Specification. Control/386 is also designed to accommodate some of the more subtle differences in architectural design between the 80286, 8088, and the 80386, such as emulating undocumented 80286 instructions not present on the 80386 as well as emulating the 8088’s 1Mb memory limit. It also supports 32-bit memory in the 512Kb to 640Kb range for systems lacking 640Kb standard RAM and enables users to run PC-DOS applications using timing-dependent, copy-protection schemes on the high-speed 80386 CPU.
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