Preserving games on floppy discs

[Stormstout]

Hi!
I must admit that I am a bit of a newbie, a greenhorn when it concerns tempering with my PC. I have quite a new hardware that I use for everyday work and gaming but I also have a separate setup straight from 1990! The 90s set has of course floppy disc readers and two of them. The 1.2" and 1.4". I can install and play games from the floppies on the old machine. However, I was wondering would there be a way to copy those games to a CD and then emulate them on the newer PC? CD or maybe Pendrive? Floppies are unreliable and I would hate to lose my library of classic games. I want to save them somehow but I lack knowledge and ideas on how to proceed.

 

[GeoffB17]

This is complicated.

The first big problem is - will the game software even run on the newer machine? It might not. All you can do is try it and see.

The second problem is copy protection, the software on the floppy disk might include software 'devices' to stop a copy working.

You can use imageing software to create an image copy of the floppy disk, this will include any 'tricks' that might be there to prevent normal copying, and this will preserve the software, but it might not help in running it on another system.

Another possibility could be that you might try to install the software onto the pendrive (USB stick ?), if that it possible, and it will run there (might need the original disk inserted as well) then at least you've got the working game on more durable hardware.

Might be able to say more if you say what OS is on your newer machine, and some examples of the games you're hoping to 'save'?

Geoff

 

[Timo W.]

It's not complicated. PC games normally don't have on-disk copy protection since 1989 with a very few exceptions. Use WinImage to create disk images of the floppy disks. Use DOSBox to play them on modern machines. That's it. People do it this way for over a decade now.

 

[SomeGuy]

The best way to "preserve" floppy disk contents is with a flux-level copier like a Kryoflux, SuprtCard Pro or Greaseweazle. These literally record the raw magnetic flux output from a floppy drive, those will read most copy protected disks.

If you know a disk is not copy protected, then make sure the disk is write protected, and image the sector contents with a tool like WinImage. Note that if you use a USB 3.5" floppy drive you need to make sure it support 720k floppy disks, as some lower quality drives don't.

 

[Chuck(G)]

It's not complicated. PC games normally don't have on-disk copy protection since 1989 with a very few exceptions. Use WinImage to create disk images of the floppy disks. Use DOSBox to play them on modern machines. That's it. People do it this way for over a decade now.

When games were shipped on 360K 5.25" disks, copy protection was in full flower. Since the "Don't copy that floppy" campaign didn't work, game vendors went to various copy protection schemes. As far as I'm aware, almost all of the EA games were copy protected. Copy-protection defeating programs often employed patching the game binaries to enable disks to be copied using standard utilities. IIRC, CopyRite was one such program.

 

[T-R-A]

I have a triple-boot system for such (DOS/WIN98/2K). Usually will copy the disks to an appropriately-named directory on the HDD in DOS, then burn the directories (usually games/programs of the same genre) to a CD/DVD in Win2K. Many of the older games will play straight off the optical disc through DOSBox.

 

[NeXT]

When games were shipped on 360K 5.25" disks, copy protection was in full flower. Since the "Don't copy that floppy" campaign didn't work, game vendors went to various copy protection schemes. As far as I'm aware, almost all of the EA games were copy protected. Copy-protection defeating programs often employed patching the game binaries to enable disks to be copied using standard utilities. IIRC, CopyRite was one such program.

EA was shipping copy protection well into the 90's. Even the expansion packs for The Sims had copy protection on the CD's.

 

[DOSDays]

It's also worth mentioning that if you are then trying to use floppy disk images to install the games, a lot of the INSTALL.EXE utilities are looking for the files on A: or B: (your floppy drive letters), so just running from a USB or CD that might be D: or E: for example will cause the installation to fail. One little trick is to use the DOS 'SUBST' utility to make a directory appear like it's a floppy drive. SUBST A: D:\mygamefolder, for example, then allows you to go to A: and run the installer from there. DOSBOX also has the SUBST utility built-in, so this works there also.