I had a Zip drive (parallel) as a kid that was also good to swap games. I do burn a lot of CDs currently because many games from GOG.com have the full installation CD and that's quite handy.

It is obvious that nothing can beat networking at ease of use (meaning no swapping hardware of any sort is allowed).
BUT you will need at least Win 3.11 for workgroups on the weakest machines.

Under DOS, even with mTCP, it is no such fun with all the typing in the console...
I do not know of any NC clone that provides comfortable browsing of shared network drives. Dos Navigator came close but the TCP/IP implementation eventually failed.

Like it or not, the common lowest denominator in all basic retro PCs is the floppy drive, COM and LPT ports. If it was not YOU who built the rig you cannot count on having a CDROM in a 386 /486 machine that your friend drops at you for a pimping-out... So, when going external, the LPT port is the best option. Either using the laplink cable or having an external CDROM/DVD enclosure to carry around. I have an LPT DVD enclosure with built-in PSU. The interface is also compatible with hard drives but I just use DVDs because of their larger capacity. So the only anachronistic hardware is the DVD itself.

Bridged CF cards are ultra-anachronistic and with FAT16, still have half the capacity of a DVD. There is no denying that they are the most convenient external solution.

Floptical drives are pretty fragile but one can have fun with ZIP and LS drives as well. They are not so reliable and have much smaller capacity but can be written onto even on a lowly 386 under DOS - this is impossible with a DVD drive.

Jolaes76 wrote:

[...] Under DOS, even with mTCP, it is no such fun with all the typing in the console... I do not know of any NC clone that prov […]
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[...]
Under DOS, even with mTCP, it is no such fun with all the typing in the console...
I do not know of any NC clone that provides comfortable browsing of shared network drives. Dos Navigator came close but the TCP/IP impementation eventually failed.
[...]

under dos with mTCP you don't have to type commands, just start the ftp server and do ALL file management from a recent pc that holds the files, even the simplest GUI ftp client is capable of moving/deleting/editing/creating/renaming files and directories...

Also my tests showed that mTCP was actually faster than wfw311 in file transfers 🤑

keropi wrote:

Also my tests showed that mTCP was actually faster than wfw311 in file transfers

just tested isanetworkcard and pcinetworkcard on a p3-450mhz in wfw311 with total commander's ftp client. The important thing i noticed i have to zip files/folders to one file (uncompressed) as it takes lot of time for starting the transfer of each single file. One huge file goes with lan card's max speed (at least the 10mbps card, as the 100mbps was limited by hdd speed i guess)

Yep, 1 file is faster. If you have smartdrv loaded though it goes much faster when you transfer multiple files...

smartdrv was loaded (it was placed in autoexec and config by windows during installation as default).

by "it goes much faster when you transfer multiple files" I mean relatively to the speed of transferring said files without smartdrv... it does not get the same speed as 1 zip 😀

I did some further investigation:
used quarentine as it has over 500 files
i arranged them by size before transferring
the result was that files with size 4235 bytes and lower transfered very fast, while files of size 4417 bytes and larger transfered very slow
Any reason for that?

edit: skipped smartdrv lines during boot and the result is the same as above

edit: more precisely 😉
4380 and less is fast
4381 and more is slow

could it be the nic's dos driver? what nic are you testing with robertmo?

googled a bit and figured out it has something to do with filezilla's server miscellaneous options: internal transfer buffer size and socket buffer size.
Am experimenting with them and got good results so will try further 😀
i guess they are not set right for communication with old computers 😉

I have a ThinkPad with both a DVD-ROM drive and a floppy drive built in, so things have been easy. Before that I used a PCMCIA-to-SD adapter that only Win98 could detect. My dad's 5150 has a 3.5" floppy drive in it (as well as a HDD) and it's only a matter of time before I get my hands on that.

If you have a machine that you can not stuff another card in or do not want to leave a card in then consider parallel port attached devices.

• Parallel port Zip drives are great but you need to use the paid PalmZip drivers on 8088 class CPUs.
• For quick and easy networking use a Xircom PE3-10BT parallel port to Ethernet device. I use these on my PCjrs and old portable machines that do not have standard ISA slots.
• Parallel to SCSI adapters like the Trantor/Adaptec 338 and 348 are great for external parallel port devices.

As far as mTCP goes, here are some tips for performance:

• If you are using the mTCP server Increase the buffers for the socket and file read buffer to the max, assuming you have the memory.
• Limit the number of socket connections from your clients. FileZilla and other clients are anti-social and assume your FTP server is modern; they open lots of connections. No more than 2 or 3 simultaneous connections should be needed.
• If you are using the mTCP client, also increase the buffer sizes to the max.

-Mike

It's never been so easy for me. It's as simple as removing the SD Card i'm using as hard drive, copy the files in my main system, put the card in the machines again and it's good to go.