DOS ain't dead

floppyem.sys - config.sys Floppy Emulator device driver (Announce)

posted by Arjay, 08.05.2010, 18:03
(edited by Arjay on 08.05.2010, 18:25)

> One can emulate floppies using BOCHS (Pentium 3 and above) ... but no
> legacy DOS kernel can mount a floppy image itself

There is presently no such thing as floppyem.sys but I am thinking out loud here on purpose. This discussion and noticing that one of those USB floppy emulators on ebay supports 100 different floppies as files, together with various comments on the HxC forums about supporting DOS images made me think that a loadable DOS "floppy emulator" driver would be the answer for many DOS users as it would not matter what the initial boot media was etc.

I also seem to remember in the distant past I seem to vaguely remember a few RAM drive programs which possibly supported saving of contents as a file anyway?

[EDIT] - Going through various RAMDISKS on SIMTEL it would appear that I am wrong. Note: ramsave.zip is a simple XCOPY type of program. I did however note that srdsk208.zip did appear to support an interesting bootsector option. When it came to ram-disks I never used either program though.


Still what I am thinking about here is 1 driver which supports the emulation of several different drives at the same time from 1 or multiple image files. Sadly I don't have the resources to make this happen myself easily at the moment, but by putting this basic idea here I thought others may be interested in picking up this idea.

Complete thread:

• FYI: DEATH (again, after cca 30 years) - DOS386, 07.05.2010, 05:07 (Announce)
  • HxC SD card floppy emulator / Virtual Floppy Drive / Flopper - Arjay, 07.05.2010, 17:27
    • DEATH / HxC SD card floppy emulator / Virtual Floppy Drive - DOS386, 08.05.2010, 07:02
      • DEATH / HxC SD card floppy emulator / Virtual Floppy Drive - Arjay, 08.05.2010, 13:18
        • Other hardware floppy emulators - using USB sticks on ebay - Arjay, 08.05.2010, 16:43
        • DEATH / HxC SD card floppy emulator / Virtual Floppy Drive - DOS386, 13.05.2010, 03:51
  • FYI: DEATH (again, after cca 30 years) - Rugxulo, 08.05.2010, 13:35
    • FYI: DEATH (again, after cca 30 years) - Arjay, 08.05.2010, 13:55
  • floppyem.sys - config.sys Floppy Emulator device driver - Arjay, 08.05.2010, 18:03
    • floppyem.sys - config.sys Floppy Emulator device driver - rr, 08.05.2010, 21:12
      • floppyem.sys - config.sys Floppy Emulator device driver - Arjay, 09.05.2010, 00:39
  • FDD emulator - Vehudis, 09.05.2010, 08:46
    • FDD emulators - fakedisk (read-only) + DF-IFS (read/write) - Arjay, 09.05.2010, 12:27
  • FYI: DEATH (again, after cca 30 years) - roytam, 09.05.2010, 09:48