Run IMG file on Dos w/out floppy

Quadko · Post by **Quadko** » Fri Mar 07, 2014 9:32 am

I think I remember there was a way to load a floppy image file (booter game) on a dos machine without actually writing it to a floppy, but I don't remember the particulars. It was some 3rd party loader program, as I recall, and just loaded the file into memory and ran it.

Does anyone remember this, or have a link or a name I could search for?

I'm trying to fire up my XT with an XT-IDE, but a few of the games I want to play are booters, and I'm hoping to avoid the floppy shuffle.

Quadko · Post by **Quadko** » Fri Mar 07, 2014 10:01 am

Ah yes, Flopper: "The bootable floppy disk emulator" from www.oldskool.org! That was what I was looking for.

Post by **dosraider** » Fri Mar 07, 2014 10:58 am

Meh, retrograde station has shut down again ....????

[Edit]
Nevermind, has been moved to a .ru site ...

Quadko · Post by **Quadko** » Fri Mar 07, 2014 11:34 am

Reading back through his articles on oldskool was a fun diversion. PC sounds, copy protection, and demoscenes. Happy days. But I really love usb and multi-gig thumbdrives and multi-tera portable drives.

Malvineous · Post by **Malvineous** » Fri Mar 14, 2014 9:01 pm

Another solution, although it requires a bit more work, is to use Memdisk and a network card with PXE support. Then you can boot the PC over the network and choose which floppy image you want to boot. You can even boot a floppy that mounts a network drive, allowing you to play all your DOS games on a machine with no disks in it at all - no floppy, hard drive or USB sticks needed.

Quadko · Post by **Quadko** » Sat Mar 15, 2014 12:01 am

Cool, that's pretty wild. I haven't run into that one before!

Post by **dosraider** » Sat Mar 15, 2014 2:34 am

Was used lot with Linux, interesting is that you can boot from almost any size of floppy-CD image,
Even more interesting was that it loaded the image in high mem, only grabbed a small amount of precious lower (base) mem.

Been a long time I've used it, blame the VM s ..... they are in fact easier to use to test-boot-tryout-run OSses softs, and VMs run in the OS itself, don't overtake your compy .... yeah, lazy moi.

Should you be interested dig into the syslinux site:
http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/ ... ux_Project