It looks like the root cause of the issue is that the original Infocom booters deliberately malign the first 8 sectors into 4 1024-byte sectors, and use the bootloader to reprogram the FDC to deal with this at load time. I doubt ZorkTools will ever work properly outside of actual hardware. Thanks to …

DOSBox wants a recognizable filesystem on IMGMOUNTed floppy images when they're mounted. Perhaps if you boot real DOS it won't complain about no filesystem until you try to read the disk with some command. I think you're on to something! Using this method (with FreeDOS), I get: Using partition 0 on …

I think I'm starting to better understand the nature of the problem. The Infocom booters do not have a filesystem _at all_...it isn't FAT or anything else, it's entirely custom. I've mounted a raw 160KB Infocom disk image under ImDisk, which Windows of course immediately wants to format (and I …

Both "offical" DOSBox and various patched versions exhibit similar behavior. I have a number of floppy images (type IMA, extension IMG, not compressed) - some 160KB 5,25" SSSD, others 360KB 3.5" SSDD (specifically, Infocom "booter" images). Interestingly, if I try to boot them with DOSBox, they boot …