[Offer] Random 5.25" Stuff

wingzeroismine

Hello everyone, I was given a large organizer full of floppies a couple years ago and finally decided to go through it and catalog the contents, published here. I have not tested anything yet but if you are interested in fiddling with something or WinWorld admins want to add any of it to the collection then just let me know and I'll see what happens.


You can go here to view the collection.

SomeGuy

That AT&T OEM DOS sounds interesting. I wonder what specific machine it was meant for? Likely whatever machine went with that AT&T VGA card. Don't usually think of AT&T DOS machines other than the 6300, but there obviously were others.

Over all, a very nice collection of vintage business titles.

wingzeroismine

Thanks, it was pretty much just handed to me and I don't have any contact with the person who gave it to me anymore. I'll work on capturing some of the floppies tomorrow and see how it goes.

Currently my 5.25" drive is in a 486 that should be dual booting 95 and 3.11, I'll presumably just be using an old version of WinImage for the capture unless anyone else has suggestions.

SomeGuy

Be sure to write protect the disks. Windows 9x modifies boot sectors with it's volume tracker.

wingzeroismine

Then 3.11 it is....

SomeGuy

BTW, you can partially disable the Win9x Volume Tracker by adding the following registry entries:

REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem\NoVolTrack]

; valid DOS 2.0+ formatted boot sectors:

"Any DOS formatted disk 0"     = hex:FE,01,55,AA                   ; any formatted disk (signature) (not really true any more); BeOS 3.2 disks
"Any DOS formatted disk 1"     = hex:00,00,EB                      ; any formatted disk (modern)
"Any DOS formatted disk 2"     = hex:00,00,E9                      ; any formatted disk (old)
"Any DOS formatted disk 3"     = hex:00,00,90                      ; any formatted disk (NOP)
"Any DOS formatted disk 4"     = hex:00,00,69                      ; any formatted disk

That covers at least %99.99 of the disks out there, and generally prevents accidents.

Still good to write protect disks. Prevents alterations by a surprise virus, editors, config changes from running the software, resident tools that want to write hidden data to all folders, writing last access dates. Etc.

Typically I use a DOS machine for archiving disks, and use ImageDisk and TeleDisk to create images, then convert the IMD images to raw IMG for WinImage or similar. For copy protected disks I also make CopyIIPC+Snatchit and TransCopy images. For good measure I will also zip the files on the disk from there when possible. Extraction tools like Winimage barf on disks formatted for DOS 1.x, as well disks with odd FAT offsets, or incorrect sectors per track.

calvinb

Still doesn't help you if say, you find one using a rare backup system (say, CP backup?) or an ancient Unix. Just write-protect it as he said, no accidents.

wingzeroismine

I've just been using winimage 5 in 3.11, I've done about 80 floppies so far and not really any errors, the couple that gave me trouble worked fine on repeated attempts, though for some reason the entire machine hangs once in a great blue moon while winimage is doing its reads.

You can go here to view what I've done so far. I haven't tested anything out, when they are confirmed working I'll start moving them into a verified folder.

Some of them may accidentally be labeled IMA when in fact they were compressed IMZ..... I'll weed through and correct those, I was planning to leave compression out of this.

SomeGuy

That AT&T DOS 3.3a could certainly help someone. Looking closer, it is customized in many places over Microsoft's MS-DOS 3.3a. And the help files do mention the 6300. Specifically "RAMDRIVE.SYS is intended for use with the AT&T PC 6300 PLUS with extended memory beyond the resident 640k." I vaguely recall someone asking for something like this over at the vintage computing forums.

(Curse winimage always wanting to store in IMZ format. Emulators don't like that format, but at least is really just a PKZIP file that you can extract the actual IMA from.)

Also, if these are factory made disks, it is good to include a scan or photo of the label. Sometimes that shows subtle details like part numbers, sub-version numbers, and otherwise helps make a mental "connection" to a physical object.

I'll take a closer look at the others when I get a chance.

wingzeroismine

SomeGuy wrote:

Also, if these are factory made disks, it is good to include a scan or photo of the label. Sometimes that shows subtle details like part numbers, sub-version numbers, and otherwise helps make a mental "connection" to a physical object.

I'll take a closer look at the others when I get a chance.

I agree, I was thinking of actually tossing the floppies on my scanner, at least the first ones, some of them have serials and stuff printed on them.

Also... apologies for leaving them in the 8.3 format, I'll flesh out their names later.

SomeGuy

Actually, 8.3 filenames are sometimes preferable depending on what one might recreate them with. Typically, I stick to 8.3 for 360k because my 360k drive is on my DOS machine. Just make sure the folder or archive file name is descriptive enough.

wingzeroismine

I've corrected the IMA/IMZ issues, tested out the various dos versions although dos 4 would crash the VM. I spot checked a few programs here and there. The 3.1 install also worked fine.

Tomorrow I'll go about putting the software in to more fleshed out folder names and scan the labels of their source floppies.

I do have a Mean 18 Golf game in the group but its first disk is missing in action, I tried another download elsewhere to see if I could just swipe the first disk but it seemed like a drastically different version of the game.

EDIT: I had an MS works issue, looks like I accidentally put two of the windows print system floppies in that folder and never actually managed to capture its disk 4, so crisis averted.

EDIT 2:

I've added scans of the first photogenic label in the respective sets, cleaned up and organized everything as I saw fit. At this point the collection is done and no further edits will be made.

SomeGuy

Haven't had a chance to look through all of that yet, but it looks good so far.

The MS-DOS 4 appears to be an Emerson OEM. It has a custom IO.SYS and extra HD utilities. Haven't seen any Emerson OEMs floating around before. Obviously IBM compatible, it booted fine in MESS PC emulation.

Phoenix Computer Products MS-DOS 3.3 appears complete, although I think it might just be "3.3", not "3.3a". In fact, the date stamps suggest it is slightly earlier than Vanilla MS-DOS 3.3.

MS-DOS 5 AST OEM looks good. Don't think I have seen a 1.2mb 5.25" version of the AST OEM.

The AST Win3.1 5.25" appears exactly identical to a vanilla MS-Win3.1 5.25".

The BEC DOS 5.0 is interesting because I don't think I have seen any 360k version of DOS 5 out there. The support files differ slightly from vanilla MS-DOS, but the IO and MSDOS sys files are the same.

And of course, the IBM DOS 3.3 disks are identical to known IBM DOS 3.3.