Yes, I understand the problem but what I’m saying is when you shutdown to DOS (even without rebooting) win.com was shutoff. Since it was win.com that disabled EMM386 you were free to run your HIMEM whatever again. Thus having a full DOS environment without a full reboot (which used to be slow in those days).
Thinking about it some more, I think I might have had a subset autoexec.bat I used to run for those occasions.
That technique seemed to work for me. Maybe I’m forgetting a tonne of 16 bit games that didn’t play but nothing immediately springs to mind
EMM386 was usually run from autoexec.bat. But HIMEM was a driver installed via config.sys. I think there were some complications with the latter with "reboot to DOS".
Thinking about it some more, I think I might have had a subset autoexec.bat I used to run for those occasions.
That technique seemed to work for me. Maybe I’m forgetting a tonne of 16 bit games that didn’t play but nothing immediately springs to mind