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First post, by zippyTpinhead

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Slightly long story, but I need to use multiple floppy disks in a game. Seems like the way to go is to use IMGMOUNT and ctrl-F4. However IMGMOUNT only accepts multiple image files if they are CD images. (Manual says "Specifying a number of image files is only allowed for CD-ROM images," and I have found that to be true.) OTOH, the documentation for ctrl-F4 says it will "change between mounted floppy/CD images." Is there a way to mount two floppy images so that I can swap between them using crtl-F4? I've tried mounting one floppy image as a: and another as b:, but in that case ctrl-F4 has no effect.

Story is this: I'm playing an old text game, Voodoo Island from Mindscape, using DOSBox on a win10 machine. The original game was sold on a floppy, and to save your game it expected you to take the game floppy out of the drive and put in a blank one. It refuses to save to the game disk. So I need to emulate the exchange of game disk and save disk. I'm also checking to see if I can set up what I need with CD image files, which would maybe get me around the DOSBox issue. Meanwhile, I'm thinking that if I could only swap between two floppy images, I'd be all set.

Reply 3 of 5, by zippyTpinhead

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OK, I ran the latest SVN from EMUcr.com. It allows multiple floppy images. Great! Swapping images with ctrl-F4 works. Great! But when I go to save a game, the image is WRITE PROTECTED. 😵 The read-only attribute is not set in windows, so it seems like either a floppy image is inherently not writable (in which case saving a game seems impossible) or else I'm missing a setting in DOSBox. Or something. I used winimage.exe to create the floppy images as *.ima files. It doesn't appear to have any options to allow or disallow writing.

Any suggestions? Thx!

Reply 4 of 5, by ripsaw8080

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The game likely uses low-level disk functions, which aren't supported (yet) with multi-floppy mounts. However, it will probably work with the BOOT command if the game disk is bootable; e.g. "BOOT GAME.IMA SAVE.IMA", and press Ctrl-F4 to swap images.

Reply 5 of 5, by zippyTpinhead

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ripsaw8080 wrote:

The game likely uses low-level disk functions, which aren't supported (yet) with multi-floppy mounts. However, it will probably work with the BOOT command if the game disk is bootable; e.g. "BOOT GAME.IMA SAVE.IMA", and press Ctrl-F4 to swap images.

Yes! That cracked it. As you know (and basically told me), and as I discovered (the hard way, in spite of your telling me), BOOT command turns out badly unless the image is bootable. I downloaded a bootable image for DOS 4.01 from allbootdisks.com, and then I used WinImage to add the game files to it. One wrinkle was that at first I made an empty image file for the save disk, but DOSBox could not open it. I tried adding a random small file to the image, and then it worked. When doing a save the game ignores extra file.

Many thanks!