I don't see why it wouldn't work, other than the drives would be slower than a hard drive and the drivers would gobble up (conventional, unless you're using emm386) memory which tends to be in short supply.

So as far as the disks being their own drive letter, yeah there's no reason it wouldn't work. I'm thinking more in terms of performance, if there's a discernible difference running games off the disks vs running games off the hard drive. I think I'll just have to try it and see.

Never tried it but we used to play games off of cassette tapes so it can't be any worse than that. heh
I wonder if smartdrv would have any effect.

LGR did a video where he ran duke3d off a zip drive, load times were horrible

I have 2 iomega drives i both run dos game from they are parallel not scsi.
they run fine even with games like duke 3d yes its slow for the first time but once its in ram it runs ok
older games are better like the old 3d apogee titles.
i was using 1 on my 286 for a while when the mfm drive broke
worked well

For that matter, you could play DOS games off floppy drives. As long as you load Smartdrv or another diskcache beforehand, it will only be slow for the initial load. Then, cached in RAM, the game will fly.

For that matter, you could play DOS games off floppy drives. As long as you load Smartdrv or another diskcache beforehand, it will only be slow for the initial load. Then, cached in RAM, the game will fly.

Personally, I prefer running DOS games off a large ramdrive. I compress each game to a .7z archive and put these archives on a bootable DOS USB memory stick. Create a ramdrive large enough for the uncompressed game, and then decompress the .7z archive to that ramdrive, and I'm in bliss. Fast as fast can be, and 7zip usually compressess most DOS games from 50% to 75% or more. It's a great DOS archiver, much, much better than Pkzip, ARJ, or even RAR.