plamy1969 wrote:Jo22 wrote:
Sorry, I'm afraid I'm not up-to-date when it comes to DOSBox. 😅 I believed it doesn't support bare metal stuff like this.
But Virtual PC and a real floppy drive worked for me. I ran QCopy several times on it and it worked (albeit slow).
I was running real-mode DOS on it back then (v.6.22).
And how did you make Virtual PC to recognize and control the real floppy drive using FreeDOS?
I didn't. Virtualizers like Virtual PC, VmWare or VirtualBox do emulate the standard floppy controller.
To DOS it looks like you have got an ordinary floppy drive connected to an IBM compatible floppy controller.
The virtualisation software then passes these requests from your DOS program to any available
floppy drive your host operating system sees (the "host OS" is the OS your PC runs on. Like Windows 7 x64,
Linux or MacOS X).
This way, DOS needs no special driver or anything like this. It can work with USB floppy drives, SCSI floppy drives,
or internal floppy drives. In theory, you can even use 5.25" or 8" models with your VM.
Or you can use an image file, of couse (handled by the VM itself).
This depends solely on the ability of your host OS and the software inside the VM:
The emulated BIOS must be configured accordingly (it normaly is). If not, nothing is lost.
You can then use drivparm. The VM's emulated BIOS defaults to 1.44MB 3.5" type..
The only exception here are non-standard floppy drives, like LS-120 or ZIP.
They may need a special driver to work inside the VM. In this case, simply install Windows 98 inside you VM.
Virtual PC can pass-trough the parallel port, so you could use a parallel ZIP drive there.
But that's just an example. Let's don't make things more complicated than necessary. 😉
Edit: The Virtual PC window does have floppy tab, where you can choose between an image file and the real floppy "use physical drive A:".
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