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A treasure trove of old originals

T

tezza

Veteran Member
Joined
Oct 1, 2007
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Reading about Quickbasic on these forums made me go looking through some old archive boxes at work. I used to have Quickbasic and vaugely remembered archiving a lot of original 5.25 program floppies years and years ago.

Anyway, I worked my way down through the archive storage room and sure enough, there was a file box there with my name on it. Inside the file box was a lot of 5.25 floppy disks with old data PLUS a heap of original program disks I'd obviously kept for posterity.

There was...

  • Microsoft Show Partner (the precursor to powerpoint) and Microsoft Paint
  • Turbo Assembler and Debugger
  • Turbo Pascal
  • Turbo Basic
  • Xywrite (remember Xywrite!)
  • Wordperfect for Windows!!
  • Practical Statistics
  • Genius mouse software (Dr Halo and the like)
  • VP-Expert
  • Numerous MS-DOS versions

It was cool to find these. No QuickBasic disks or Windows 1.0 disks (which I'm sure accompanied Show Partner and Paint). I must have tossed them or lost them at the time. Not to worry, I picked up QB 4.5 elsewhere.

There was also a number of games and data disks containing stuff I'd done all those years ago.

One project now is to archive all of this material using WinImage. I wonder how many of the disks are still readable? I guess I'll soon find out.
 
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Nice find! my workplace cleaned out our library several years ago-I managed to snag the documentation for the Brief editor, a 16bit future domain SCSI controller (new in box!), a copy of the 7th guest on CD, and a full set of MASM books.

The lab that I work at occasionally purges lots of old equipment too-I've coem home with KVM switches, old motherboards (not THAT old-pentium class), a few hard drives...

I wonder how many other workplaces have stashes of old stuff-my company encourages us to take things on "indefinite loan" because it saves them the hassle of having to find a scrap dealer to take the stuff away.

I'd be very interested in knowing what games you end up finding-seeing how I'm trying to archive every DOS game ever... Please let me/us know.
 
Very nice! That is a really great find!

When I inherited (from a fellow ham radio operator in my town) the five AT&T PC 6300's, I also got several boxes of software. That was about three or so years ago, and I still haven't made the time to go through those boxes. Makes me wonder what gems lie waiting to be discovered in them... :)
 
hargle said:
I'd be very interested in knowing what games you end up finding-seeing how I'm trying to archive every DOS game ever... Please let me/us know.
Click to expand...

Here are some of the games I found on these old disks...

  • Stargate - An Eliminator-type game with a ship in a scrolling landscape
  • Flightmare - Some kind of Mad Max-type game with tanks, motorbikes etc.
  • Striker - A helicopter horizontal scroll arcade game
  • Rockford - An adventure Game of some sort
  • Mixed-up Mother Goose - Sierra-type game my kids use to love
  • The Wizard's Castle - Text based Dungeon Role Playing Game (BASIC)
  • Falcon - Jet Flight simulator (Spectrum/Holobyte)
  • CIA Adventure (BASIC Program I typed in from some book)
  • Escape from Soviet Science and Detention Base (BASIC Adventure)
  • Castle Adventure (Simple "overhead view" graphics Adventure)
  • 747flt - Cockpit flight simulator for 747 (BASIC)
  • Lord of the Rings (haven't checked this one out yet).
  • Turbo Chess. ASCII-based chess game written in Turo Pascal

The Mother Goose one was a great find as my daughters used to LOVE playing this when they were were in elementary school and before. They are now in their late teens/early 20s so they will get a real kick out of it when I show them.

Oh, I also found original disks of DBXL, a DBASE2 clone!

Tez
 
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Some really good stuff there, Tez -- Stargate is really fun -- if it's the same game I'm thinking of which was put out by Atarisoft. It was the sequel to "Defender". And "Falcon" is one of my favorite early flight sim games.

Congrats on a fantastic score!
 
I found a few more...

Ironman's Offroad Racer
Indy 500
Street Racer 2
Lemmings (VGA)

I used to LOVE Lemmings! I wasted a good few many hours on that one.

It runs just fine on my 386DX. So cool to see it again...

Tez
 
tezza said:
One project now is to archive all of this material using WinImage. I wonder how many of the disks are still readable? I guess I'll soon find out.
Click to expand...

I think you'll find them all readable. But if winimage saves into some non-standard format (ie. a header is on the image or something) could you use something like disk2img instead? winimage isn't free, IIRC.
 
Personally, I fully recommend Mike Brutman's DSKIMAGE. A wonderous program that is easy to use once you get the commands down. Works in DOS on the oldest of machines, too. Find it at VintageIBM.net/5150_software

Mike, perhaps you want to start paying me for advertising? LOL

seriously

--Ryan
 
Trixter said:
I think you'll find them all readable. But if winimage saves into some non-standard format (ie. a header is on the image or something) could you use something like disk2img instead? winimage isn't free, IIRC.
Click to expand...

WinImage, if you save it as a non-compressed, is standard - I've been using Winimage for years. I have extremely old .IMA files (non-compressed WinImage) and they can be directly mounted with VM systems like VMWare / VirtualPC / Qemu, so it should be standard raw images, like rawrite would make.


T
 
Trixter said:
I think you'll find them all readable. But if winimage saves into some non-standard format (ie. a header is on the image or something) could you use something like disk2img instead? winimage isn't free, IIRC.
Click to expand...

Just for the record, nearly all were readable. There were the odd ones which time seemed to have rendered unserviceable. Strangley enough these tended to be the 1.2 MB ones, which were not only a minority on the collection but a few years newer than the 360k ones.

Yes, Winimage isn't free, but I did purchase a copy. This is before I realised there was such a program as Mikes DSKIMAGE.

I haven't tried Mike's program. I'm sure it's very good but I have to say WinImage does the job for me. I can save an image of a 180k or 360k PC-DOS DOS disk, and write it back out to a blank DS/DD 5.25 inch disk and have it boot and work just fine in a real IBM 5150. This is with XP and a 1.2MB drive!

Tez
 
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tezza said:
I haven't tried Mike's program. I'm sure it's very good but I have to say WinImage does the job for me. I can save an image of a 180k or 360k PC-DOS DOS disk, and write it back out to a blank DS/DD 5.25 inch disk and have it boot and work just fine in a real IBM 5150. This is with XP and a 1.2MB drive!

Tez
Click to expand...

But can you run WinImage in DOS? I do all my imaging on my vintage machines. Makes it just that much more authentic. Only trouble is, I can only fit 3 .DSK DS/DD files on a 1.44MB disk! I could save it to the HDD, but sooner or later I want it on a newer medium, so I just cut out the middle man.
1.2MB on XP, eh? I had that setup awhile back on en eMachine before my sisters computer croaked and she took on my red headed step-child eMachine. That thing supported all the way to 360K drives, and was made in 2003! I do a good amount of imaging in Windows as well when my vintage computer is off the desk. Windows 95. Interestingly enough, It does the same as yours. It can make images readable by a 5150. It can also write to a disk formatted in a 360K drive, format a 360K disk, and I can take a 360K disk back and forth writing on it with both drives, and it is still readable on an IBM 5150! I always back up the data on 1.44MB diskette or on an HDD before doing so, just in case.

--Ryan
Gawd these short and simple replies sure do get long!
 
tezza said:
I haven't tried Mike's program. I'm sure it's very good but I have to say WinImage does the job for me. I can save an image of a 180k or 360k PC-DOS DOS disk, and write it back out to a blank DS/DD 5.25 inch disk and have it boot and work just fine in a real IBM 5150. This is with XP and a 1.2MB drive!
Click to expand...

Yes, but can *I* do that? Without Winimage?

If the images are non-standard, what will you do in 10 years when you can't run winimage any more?
 
Theoretically (Mike, you need to back this up...) Mike's DSKIMAGE can do weird formats. You see, it takes a "snapshot" of the disk, not reading the actual data. So really with it, you could image a totally blank diskette or a dead one, and as long as the sectors are there it would be fine. Needs further support and/or testing. If you guys are lucky, I will test that tonight.

--Ryan
 
Trixter said:
If the images are non-standard, what will you do in 10 years when you can't run winimage any more?
Click to expand...

Is there such a thing as a "standard" disk image?

I'm not too concerned about future-proofing. WinImage is not designed specifically as a Vintage computer tool, like, say, Omniflop. But it's easy to use, reliable, painless and quick (and I own a copy). I'll stick with it for archiving MS-DOS on my XP machine. It seems to have a good foothold in the XP world for imaging so I'm confident it will be supported for some time yet.

Speaking of disk imaging, if anyone knows of a program which can read and write SINGLE DENSITY TRS-80 Model 1 NewDOS/80 v2, 80 track 5.25 inch floppies, under XP on a 1.2MB drive, then I'd like to know about it. I seem to have a motherboard and controller that can write single density (It can write BBC DFS single density disks out using Omniflop in XP) but neither single-density TRS-DOS or NEWDOS is supported in that program yet.

I say yet, because the Omniflop author does have a direct disk image dump of these OS formats from me, and may be able to add support for them if time and technology allows.

Tez
 
tezza said:
Is there such a thing as a "standard" disk image?
Click to expand...

Goodness, yes. If the disks are just regular disks, a dump of each track to a file without any headers is nearly universally recognizable. A dump of a typical DOS 360K disk is 9*2*512*40 = 368640 bytes. Hopefully Winimage's 360K disk images are that size, yes?

I'm not too concerned about future-proofing.
Click to expand...

??!?!? Then why are you imaging them in the first place?

I'll stick with it for archiving MS-DOS on my XP machine. It seems to have a good foothold in the XP world for imaging so I'm confident it will be supported for some time yet.
Click to expand...

What you're forgetting is that floppy drives themselves have already been dropped from Windows. Vista doesn't support MFM floppy drives/controllers any more; the only way you can read a floppy is to get one of those 1.44MB USB drives. I wouldn't hold your breath for a USB 5.25" drive :)
 
Hiya Trixter,

I'm sure WinImage's format is standard. It says in the blurb at http://www.winimage.com/winimage.htm "The disk image is an exact copy of a physical disk (floppy, CD-ROM, hard disk, USB, VHD disk, etc.) or a partition that preserves the original structure."

WinImage is on my XP machine at home so I can't look it up right now but from what I remember the number of bytes in the image reflects the number of bytes on the disk. But, as you point out, a standard 5.25 image might not even be relevant in years to come as modern machines won't handle those drives anyway. Future-proofing for use in REAL disks is going to impossible, as the disks themselves aren't being made anymore let alone the drives and machines that support them. At some stage, we will all just have disk images to play with and I'm confident that at least the images in this format will endure.

I might look into alternatives someday but it's just not a vintage computing priority for me at the moment to spend too much time on it. The only MS-DOS disks I wanted to image were my old "discovered" ones and there were less than 100 of those. So it's not like I'm building a huge archive, and I have to do a lot of research to minimise future "risk". If another format seems to be developing as a "standard" I'll just shift them over to that. At worst this will mean writing them out to 5.25 floppies then reading them back in in the new format. I doubt that will be necessary though.

I'll keep my old XP box as a legacy machine to write my 5.25 inch disk as long as I can keep it working. I'm very happy with both the drive controller and the 5.25 inch drive I have in it. I think I'm lucky, because what I can do this 2001 system regarding single density seems to be the exception rather than the rule. :)

Tez
 
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