USB Floppy Drives + DOSbox

[GryeDor]

Got a question for anyone that maybe has done or tried this before.

I've got an iMac and recently found a ton of 3.5" and 5.25" floppy disk games that my brother and I used to play on our old DOS PC's.

I know there are USB 3.5" Floppy drives out there (haven't seen any 5.25" USB drives though), is it possible to run the USB Floppy drive and DOSbox to install and play these games? I imagine the graphics will be difficult with VGA and SVGA and all that, but I was just curious. If I don't have to sell them and could enjoy them again (things like Humans and Sam n Max), I'd LOVE it.

Anwyay, if you have any experience with this, let me know how it went! Or, if you have some ideas, let me know!

Thanks!

[emwearz]

To best honest, games on floppys are so small you might as well just download them and play them with DOSbox.

Also Sam n Max is much better on CD, the Talkie version is amazing. Great voice acting.

[irixith]

Anwyay, if you have any experience with this, let me know how it went! Or, if you have some ideas, let me know!

I don't know if there are any quirks with mac, so I'm just going to assume the software operates the same was as it does on PC. Yes, you can use a USB floppy drive to load games from. I'm not sure anyone ever bothered making an MFM controller to USB converter, but that's not to say it couldn't be done if you still had some 5.25" drives kicking around.

If you want to run Sam 'n Max, I'd suggest going with ScummVM. You need to provide the original games files to ScummVM, but since you have those, you're laughing!

[Hatta]

Dosbox can do this fine, it's even in the wiki.

Mounting a floppy drive

Z:\>MOUNT A A:\ -t floppy

[DinnerX]

I'd recommend backing up the files on the old floppies to your hard drive and a cd before you did anything else. Just install/run them off of the backup. You never know when something will make a floppy lose or corrupt its files. Those old magnetic disks decay over time and there is always the chance of an accident.

I'm not sure what you mean by the graphics will be difficult. Dosbox emulates everything, the sound card, the Cpu, the graphics card, everything. The game's display will just be in a window on your desktop (well, unless you make it fullscreen). Or at least that's the way Dosbox is on windows, linux, and bsd. I've never used a mac.

There's probably a Dosbox front-end for macs to make configuring all the settings easy for different games. You might find some helpful tips for getting stuff running here http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewforum.php?f=3

Or maybe you just meant difficult on the eyes.

[Hatta]

If you really want to use the disks, put together an old DOS machine. The nostalgia is much more potent that way.

[gtmtnbiker]

One thing I learned recently is that if you have something that spans multiple floppies, you need to use an older version of DOS box (0.70) which has multi-floppy support. Apparently they removed it from the newer versions temporarily due to some issues.

[Hatta]

If you're working from actual discs, that shouldn't be a problem. Just change the disk and next time you access A: inside dosbox it will check the actual drive A and return the updated directory listing.

If you want to do this with floppy images, you can just mount the image to a directory and mount that directory as A in dosbox. Then just alt-tab away and unmount/mount the new image as needed. In linux you can mount a floppy image with 'mount -o loop floppy.img floppydir/', I'd imagine Windows has something similar?

[Anapan]

I don't know about using a USB floppy drive on a Mac machine. I've had a lot of difficulty using Mac format floppy disks on my windows machines before, and had to use software specially made to interface with my floppy drive. Then again, the usb drive might work excellently. They're common and cheap enough it's worth a shot.
What I'd do myself (and have done) is back them up to .IMA format on a windows machine first (after vacuuming/blowing out the dust on it's floppy drive). The most commonly used software for that is Winimage. If any of the disks have copy protection, the image files will retain their functionality that way. Then as mentioned above use the imgmount command with the option -t floppy
I made sure the PCs drive was still functional by using Winimage to burn(?) and then create/read another image off of a new floppy disk and compared the 2 images to make sure they were identical.

A few years back I was asked to recover some data off a 5 1/4" disk for a customer. I ended up having to build an old tower computer, find the right ribbon cable that allowed the atari-cart-like interface the 5 1/4" floppy drives had and an actual old heavy floppy drive. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, something got damaged (probably the disk) because I never was able to read the files. I'd be happy to sell you the drive and cable...

[fastbilly1]

I don't know about using a USB floppy drive on a Mac machine. I've had a lot of difficulty using Mac format floppy disks on my windows machines before, and had to use software specially made to interface with my floppy drive.

I had luck with doing that by running OS7 in a sandbox. Now they have it as a portable app, but back when I needed to do it, it was a bit more complicated. My Powerbook 520c still works decently well despite being 30mhz.