Okay, let's assume you do what most people in this community would suggest and legally obtain one of the old mid/late-80's adventure titles through eBay. You may notice the game you want is only available on the old-skool kind of floppy format - the big, thin square ones that make you hark back to the early days of the C64 (for me at least =P). However, your computer is significantly new enough in this day and age to not really come with a built-in floppy drive of any kind (and likely you don't know if your motherboard even has a (suitable?) floppy controller for you to use). A USB floppy drive leaves you sorted when it comes to the later 3.5" type, but leaves no love for 5 1/4".
So! - one asks of you - what would be the ideal, modern-day solution to access and utilise such disks, mainly in the hope that you can chuck them through WinImage and back them up so you needn't have to worry about messing with old disks anymore?
I really hope it's not tediously complicated, expensive (I'd imagine the games themselves would be costly enough) or demanding of "cable-hacking" knowledge. Cheers!
I didn't extract my classic games from floppy, i think it is risky and complicated nowadays. If you have a legal copy of them, you are 'allowed' to have a backup, and, in my opinion, the way you got it is not the most important thing.
I didn't extract my classic games from floppy, i think it is risky and complicated nowadays. If you have a legal copy of them, you are 'allowed' to have a backup, and, in my opinion, the way you got it is not the most important thing.
Isn't anyone going to censor this comment?
Let's quote comments that should be censored so that there are triplicates of the comment that should be censored. Yeeehawwww!
WEll, the most important thing is to let Jacks know that he should read the forum rules:P Even if that is his personal opinion, we do not allow comments like that here, even if he doesnt link to warez he is encouraging people to do things that are not endorsed by ScummVM.
What I'd ultimately like is for some kind soul out there to build a USB 5.25" disk drive to make my job easier, but you can't always have everything. =P
Still, did DOS really have a built-in imaging program all along? I can't possibly say I noticed.
So basically copying the files off the disks? Well that's good too, but I'm quite fussy about preserving filesystems, hence me wanting to dump diskimages.
Curiously, WinImage supports 5 1/4" disks and all, but with no easy means of using them without resorting to ancient hardware it's kinda rendered a tad moot.
Any computer that can still support a ribbon-cable 3.5" disk drive can support a 5.25" drive as well. If your computer can, just get an old drive off eBay or something. Maybe even a rummage sale somewhere. I have two myself.
Last edited by MusicallyInspired on Tue Apr 28, 2009 2:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I done an EBay worldwide search and it returned quite a few 5.25 drives at reasonable prices. I was reminded that you could also get slimline versions. There's even a few with nice black faceplates. I only ever had beige.
Surely it's just a case of knowing how to set it up in the BIOS and on the cable like others have said.
Anybody remember the flippy disk notcher? There's even a few of them on EBay. A friend had one but I never did. I think I must of had more money back then than now.
