I used to work as a technician getting DOS/Windows 3.X and OS/2 2.X systems working. There was a program I used to identify expansion cards and get the ID number off of them. It could detect memory size as well, but that doesn't work in modern systems anymore.
Had a VP with a WANG PC that used Microchannel, he needed Netware, AS/400, and the Wal-Mart client going at the same time and not cut into his 640K of DOS memory.
There was a trick to it. First using card IDs I found the option floppies for his expansion cards from CompUServe (As The Internet/WWW was in infancy and our employer paid for CompUServe to research things) and I re-arranged the expansion card memory to leave a 64K area that was not used that DOS could load drivers into it to free up the main 640K memory. At the time Netware and AS/400 used DOS drivers, while OS/2 had OS/2 drivers that could access the memory beyond it. This was before Windows 95 (It was in beta test at the time).
I had upgraded the VP to MS-DOS 6.22 used loadhigh and memmaker and other things and managed to get all three networks working with most of the 640K area free. No other tech had done things like that before.
I studied programming in college, but this gconf tool I wrote had helped me out a lot. I wrote it in college and then modified it to be named whichnet so that it could read Arcnet or Starnet network cards and use the correct Netware driver for DOS on a boot floppy disk. Either by using the expansion card ID to detect the right card or by reading ROM memory and look for patterns or a signature. It had worked 99% of the time, and in the 1% it had failed and I never learned why, but worked af\ter a reboot or shutdown and power up.
I wrote this HexStrip or HStrip to extract ASCII data out of Word Perfect or other files that got corrupt and could no longer be read. It is also good for scanning EXE and COM files in DOS to see if there is a virus that stores ASCII text when it infects without running the EXE or COM. I used it in Tradewars 2002 with the trader.dat to pull out all of his advice for playing the game in it. https://sourceforge.net/projects/hstrip/
I had bought QEMM which helped as well, until the Windows 9X and Windows NT OS models put them out of business and Symantec bought out Quarterdeck and other companies.
Also, I think B000:0000 to B700:0000 was the monochrome memory that could be used to load things into it as well if you never used it. I used to write DOS memory maps, until DOS came with MSD.exe that could show used and unused memory maps. Intel 8086/8088 had 640K of RAM, and 384K of reserved memory, that some of it can be used by EMS for paging to load things into it to free up the 640K.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/gconf/
Had a VP with a WANG PC that used Microchannel, he needed Netware, AS/400, and the Wal-Mart client going at the same time and not cut into his 640K of DOS memory.
There was a trick to it. First using card IDs I found the option floppies for his expansion cards from CompUServe (As The Internet/WWW was in infancy and our employer paid for CompUServe to research things) and I re-arranged the expansion card memory to leave a 64K area that was not used that DOS could load drivers into it to free up the main 640K memory. At the time Netware and AS/400 used DOS drivers, while OS/2 had OS/2 drivers that could access the memory beyond it. This was before Windows 95 (It was in beta test at the time).
I had upgraded the VP to MS-DOS 6.22 used loadhigh and memmaker and other things and managed to get all three networks working with most of the 640K area free. No other tech had done things like that before.
I studied programming in college, but this gconf tool I wrote had helped me out a lot. I wrote it in college and then modified it to be named whichnet so that it could read Arcnet or Starnet network cards and use the correct Netware driver for DOS on a boot floppy disk. Either by using the expansion card ID to detect the right card or by reading ROM memory and look for patterns or a signature. It had worked 99% of the time, and in the 1% it had failed and I never learned why, but worked af\ter a reboot or shutdown and power up.
I wrote this HexStrip or HStrip to extract ASCII data out of Word Perfect or other files that got corrupt and could no longer be read. It is also good for scanning EXE and COM files in DOS to see if there is a virus that stores ASCII text when it infects without running the EXE or COM. I used it in Tradewars 2002 with the trader.dat to pull out all of his advice for playing the game in it. https://sourceforge.net/projects/hstrip/
I had bought QEMM which helped as well, until the Windows 9X and Windows NT OS models put them out of business and Symantec bought out Quarterdeck and other companies.
Also, I think B000:0000 to B700:0000 was the monochrome memory that could be used to load things into it as well if you never used it. I used to write DOS memory maps, until DOS came with MSD.exe that could show used and unused memory maps. Intel 8086/8088 had 640K of RAM, and 384K of reserved memory, that some of it can be used by EMS for paging to load things into it to free up the 640K.