Important Notice

The pages on this site contain documentation for very old MS-DOS software, purely for historical purposes. If you're looking for up-to-date documentation, particularly for programming, you should not rely on the information found here, as it will be woefully out of date.

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▀ If the function succeeds, the base address of the newly allocated block
  is AX:0000.
 
▀ The default allocation strategy used by MS-DOS is "first fit"; that
  is, the memory block at the lowest address that is large enough to
  satisfy the request is allocated. The allocation strategy can be altered
  with Int 21H Function 58H.
 
▀ When a .COM program is loaded, it ordinarily already "owns" all of the
  memory in the transient program area, leaving none for dynamic alloca-
  tion. The amount of memory initially allocated to a .EXE program at load
  time depends on the MINALLOC and MAXALLOC fields in the .EXE file
  header. See Int 21H Function 4AH.
                                    -♦-