I remember having a game like that, i could only play it by booting from the disk itself.
In the game you played a tank or some kind of vehicle with a gun on the roof.
Sorry i'm not helping but you just remindet me of it. 😀

Solarstorm wrote:

I remember having a game like that, i could only play it by booting from the disk itself.
In the game you played a tank or some kind of vehicle with a gun on the roof.
Sorry i'm not helping but you just remindet me of it. 😀

Actually, I've had problem(s) with Speedball 2 at least. There have been others, but that came to my mind first.

Isn't there a provision in Dosbox to mount virtual floppy drives w/images of said floppies? Or am I thinking of another utility?

I'll have to dig through the docs later, and double check.

ElectricMonk wrote:

Isn't there a provision in Dosbox to mount virtual floppy drives w/images of said floppies? Or am I thinking of another utility?

I'll have to dig through the docs later, and double check.

Hmm, I was talking of real hw 😀

If you are talking about booter games, it may need to be ported to regular DOS. This has been done with a few booter games, but can lead to problems. The AGI Donald Duck's Playground was, but the port will crash when you try to pull up the menu.

If you are talking about some copy protection like CPC, the only way is to crack it. For Sierra CPC protected games there is the old SUP program to do this, but in a couple of cases the interpreter is encrypted, so SUP does not work.

In any case, there is no universal solution. It will depend on exactly what method was used.

emuola wrote:

ElectricMonk wrote:

Isn't there a provision in Dosbox to mount virtual floppy drives w/images of said floppies? Or am I thinking of another utility?

I'll have to dig through the docs later, and double check.

Hmm, I was talking of real hw 😀

Then why did you bring up virtual floppy drives?

For what it's worth, I've had no luck finding physical 5-1/4" or 3-1/2" floppy drives in town, and I don't trust buying hardware off Ebay, having been burned on faulty hardware several times. Maybe NewEgg or Amazon might be helpful?

ElectricMonk wrote:

emuola wrote:

ElectricMonk wrote:

Isn't there a provision in Dosbox to mount virtual floppy drives w/images of said floppies? Or am I thinking of another utility?

I'll have to dig through the docs later, and double check.

Hmm, I was talking of real hw 😀

Then why did you bring up virtual floppy drives?

For what it's worth, I've had no luck finding physical 5-1/4" or 3-1/2" floppy drives in town, and I don't trust buying hardware off Ebay, having been burned on faulty hardware several times. Maybe NewEgg or Amazon might be helpful?

I brought up virtual floppies, because I thought that maybe there was a piece of software that could fake a hdd-directory to be a floppy. I guess that's not possible. Kinda like whdload is on Amiga.

With hardware that ancient, just use your real floppies and be happy.

collector wrote:

If you are talking about booter games, it may need to be ported to regular DOS. This has been done with a few booter games, but can lead to problems. The AGI Donald Duck's Playground was, but the port will crash when you try to pull up the menu.

If you are talking about some copy protection like CPC, the only way is to crack it. For Sierra CPC protected games there is the old SUP program to do this, but in a couple of cases the interpreter is encrypted, so SUP does not work.

In any case, there is no universal solution. It will depend on exactly what method was used.

The better Donald Duck's Playground conversion (from the Atari ST) only seems to crash when you press Escape. There is no menu bar in the game, press F1 for the help menu to see the controls.

The Sierra Unprotect Program, called SUP, cracks the loader so it will decrypt the interpreter. The decryption key is contained on a bad track on the first floppy disk, and the loader program makes several checks to make sure the track is bad in several ways. If the checks are passed, then the loader will fetch the decryption key from the bad track and decrypt the interpreter, which is the game's real executable.

SUP bypasses the checks and embeds the decryption key into the loader, so it is always at the ready and the floppy disk is not needed. Sierra did this as well for its later re-releases.

Once this is done, the loader, which is often called SIERRA.COM or KQ.COM or LL.COM etc., is permanently modified. The game can be run directly if the interpreter is permanently decrypted. This can be done with a program called adecrypt, assuming the loader has been cracked with the key.

Yes, I know what SUP does. But since it was a question about protected floppy games in general, not specifically about AGI games, I only mentioned it in passing in reference to any solution depends on what the game is.

I wonder if any of these games work with a hardware floppy emulator - either the cheaper Gotek ones or the HxC.

bjt wrote:

I wonder if any of these games work with a hardware floppy emulator - either the cheaper Gotek ones or the HxC.

I was thinking the same thing, Although they have problems with non 1.44 disks I think?

I understand Flopper can in theory be used to boot images of booter games.

If a program insists on being run from drive A, then the standard DOS command "subst" can be used in a fashion similar to "mount" in DOSBox.

chinny22 wrote:

bjt wrote:

I wonder if any of these games work with a hardware floppy emulator - either the cheaper Gotek ones or the HxC.

I was thinking the same thing, Although they have problems with non 1.44 disks I think?

Can't speak for the Gotek but the HxC emulator works with all PC formats (and a lot of non-PC ones too).