How to create IMG file? WinImage does not offer this extension?
Can I ask how the floppy images on WinWorld are created? I tried using WinImage but it doesn't offer the possibility to save the images with the .img format (only IMZ and IMA).
Are the IMG files on WinWorld also created with WinImage? Any other tools people recommend to create .img files of all the physical floppies I have lying around? Thanks for the input!
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Many newer archives here are made with WinImage and then renamed to IMG. The reason for that being ".IMG" was the standard for the older archives here made using an older utility. WinImage will happily open ".IMG" files (as long as they are DOS 2.x or later FAT disks).
WinImage works well for standard non-copy protected disks. Just make sure to write protect your disks, as Windows 9x and later have a nasty habit of altering boot sectors and writing "last accessed" dates.
We also recommend ImageDisk for non-DOS disks or disks formatted for DOS 1.x (there were more than you might think). These .IMD files can be converted to IMG, but may not always be meaningful in that format.
For any copy protected stuff you would really need a Kryoflux or Super Card Pro board. Copy protected disks obviously can not be represented as a raw sector "IMG" file.
Thanks for the info. I noticed that for instance DosBox has problems mounting an IMZ / IMA image. I guess this will not be solved by just renaming it to IMG, right? Any idea what the "older utility" was to make the IMG files? Since the "real" IMG files seems to be mountable on any VM software (tried DosBox, PCEm, VirtualBox and VMWare), I'd prefer to make images in this format.
Also thanks for the tip about write-protecting my disks. I didn't think about the fact that Windows might write data on it. Does this also happen when I don't actually open files? For now I just checked my disks (= put it in my USB floppy drive and checked the content in Windows Explorer, not opening any files), but didn't try to play games from it, for instance...
IMA and IMG files are usually the exact same thing. DOSBox should be able to work with either, but I am aware of some programs that expect specific extensions. (For example, some Mac emulators, always expect a .DSK extension, so to use them in that emulator one must rename perfectly standard 1.44mb Mac .IMG files to .DSK)
.IMZ is a compressed disk image. It is literally just an .IMA/.IMG inside a zip file. Very few programs have support for that format. We avoid those here, but to extract the .IMA file just open it in a ZIP utility.
Yes, Windows modifies the boot sector even when you just access the disk to see a file listing. The idea is that 9x and later places a unique ID on each disk so it can tell the difference between disks, called a "volume tracker". This overwrites the "OEM" string, which was used by some earlier OSes and backup programs.
Newer OSes such as Windows 10 and Macos X can also write hidden desktop information, thumbnail information, and other crap to a floppy disk. Again this can occur just by looking at a directory listing.
Just viewing file content or copying files will write "last accessed" dates. Some specific editors (Like MS Word) or viewers may write temporary files as well.