Because when you request/release mem memory unamanged it fragments.
Yeah. On the Amiga (and maybe Windows95). Not on a modern OS. That's why operating systems like Linux and WindowsNT can run indefinately. They all have mechanisms for making sure memory stays unfragmented. Linux for example uses the buddy-heap principle for managing memory fragmentation. Only by reserveing a larger pool and resizing that in big(not as needed) chunks can you avoid that.
So you're saying that BlitzMAX programs require some mystery ammount of RAM to run? And even though you might actually have this mystery ammount the program will still fail, if you don't have it in contiguous (aka. unfragmented) memory?I'm sure that's a requirement they forgot to "put on the box". I for one would like to know what the minimum size of this unfragmented, unpaged memmory is, and how often one is likely to encounter it on typical low-specification machines.
Oh, and the other way to "avoid it" is to upgrade to an OS from this century, with built-in (and might I add, highly optimised [since it interfaces with the MMU directly, rather than arbitrarilly]) memory management functions.