VOGONS


Reply 40 of 51, by weldum

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PixelLogix wrote:

So it's just ridiculous, what I'm trying to do?

If the problem is that you want to use all these weird floppies and such because of HDD space constraints, you should make use of a bigger HDD or SDD and a Disk Drive Overlay, such as EZ-Drive, to overcome Bios limitations.
I'm pretty sure there are some tutorials, but you can also ask to me in how to set-up these software.
That way you can have all the software and games on just big HDDs, and transfer them using USB adapters, or via LAN.

DT: R7-5800X3D/R5-3600/R3-1200/P-G5400/FX-6100/i3-3225/P-8400/D-900/K6-2_550
LT: C-N2840/A64-TK57/N2600/N455/N270/C-ULV353/PM-1.7/P4-2.6/P133
TC: Esther-1000/Esther-400/Vortex86-366
Others: Drean C64c/Czerweny Spectrum 48k/Talent MSX DPC200/M512K/MP475

Reply 41 of 51, by jarreboum

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PixelLogix wrote:

So it's just ridiculous, what I'm trying to do?

No it's not. It's just not period accurate. But we're not in the period any more, so who cares. Enjoy your media however you want.

The idea of using floppies of higher density than 1.44 brings many inconveniences, as others have explained. But no one will blame you for wanting to have your installs on different separate removable media. It's perfectly sensible, even if it wasn't done like that back then.

Reply 42 of 51, by Shagittarius

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Everyone's just trying to warn ya...

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Reply 43 of 51, by jheronimus

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Jo22 wrote:
jheronimus wrote:

I heard about older USB drives being better than the devices you can still find for sale new.
I have two nearly no-name drives by Gembird and TEAC [..]

Is that a TEAC model FD-05PUB, by any chance ?

It's a Teac FD-34USB. The other drive turned out to be Gembird FLD-USB

MR BIOS catalog
Unicore catalog

Reply 44 of 51, by Tetrium

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PixelLogix wrote:

I was thinking about adding a floppy drive to my PC and I was wondering what drive can be installed into my PC that works with all 3.5 inch disks. I've heard that SuperDisk drives work with Standard 1.44MB and 720KB drives, but not with 2.88MB disks. What drive works with all disks?

Hi. Afaik there is no 3.5in drive that can read all 3 floppy disk types (being DD, HD and ED). I looked into this years ago and concluded that I would need 2 3.5in floppy drives to accomplish such a goal. 2.88MB drives won't read DD disks I think, but they sure will not format DD disks.
I heard about Superdisk drives that were able to read and perhaps write 2.88MB floppy disks, but afaicr I never found any.

Whats missing in your collections?
My retro rigs (old topic)
Interesting Vogons threads (links to Vogonswiki)
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Reply 46 of 51, by Myloch

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*Please delete me*

Last edited by Myloch on 2018-03-14, 13:55. Edited 1 time in total.

"Gamer & collector for passion, I firmly believe in the preservation and the diffusion of old/rare software, against all personal egoisms"

Reply 47 of 51, by Woolie Wool

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PixelLogix wrote:

So it's just ridiculous, what I'm trying to do?

Yes, very. Running games off floppy disks or other removable media was not done in the 1990s. You would buy your game, you would get a number of floppy disks inside, but those could only be used to install a game, not to run it. CDs held more, of course, but early CD drives were extremely slow and you could not write config files, saved games, etc. to a CD-ROM, so CD games had to be installed too. If your HDD is not big enough, just get a bigger one or a CF card.

The best floppy drive for an old computer is a standard 1.44MB drive. They're as common as dirt and will read any 3.5" disks used by commercial software.

Last edited by Woolie Wool on 2018-03-09, 23:56. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 48 of 51, by ab0tj

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My K6 rig has a 2GB SCSI Jaz drive as its boot medium. This may be a good alternative for you... Hard drive speed, access times, and (almost) reliability, but can still be swapped out. For example I have one disk for DOS stuff, one for Windows 3.1, etc etc.

Reply 49 of 51, by brostenen

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Floppy disks are only good for a couple of things: Installation media, driverdisk, Bootdisk and moving a couple of txt files from one machine to another. Well... That is how it was back in the late 80's to the time of Win9x. For other machines, such as Apple and Commodore machines, things are a different story. Even back in the early 90's, we just moved the harddrive from one machine to another, when copying a massive load of Dos games, using norton commander. So... Unless you have something like an 286 machine with 20mb harddrive, you will not have any need for 100's of Dos games, running directly from floppy disks. Heck'... Even games such as Doom, can be installed, using the harddrive, were the installer files are dumped in a single directory. That's how we did it back in the time of MS-Dos 6.22 and before that.

My advice is...
Use a floppy drive, only for bootdisk and installing operating systems were the installer come on floppy disks.
For moving big chunck's of data, use something like a CF card, CD's and stuff like that.
You can even use a real harddrive, the same way as you use CF cards, if you have a USB to Pata converter.
Dos stuff, does not take much space and small sized CF cards are cheap. Even CF-SD adaptors are cheap and so are SD cards.
If you have like 400mb of Dos games/programs, then why not just buy a CD-RW media?

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Those cakes make you sick....

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Reply 50 of 51, by brostenen

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ab0tj wrote:

My K6 rig has a 2GB SCSI Jaz drive as its boot medium. This may be a good alternative for you... Hard drive speed, access times, and (almost) reliability, but can still be swapped out. For example I have one disk for DOS stuff, one for Windows 3.1, etc etc.

How stable and reliable are Jazz drives and disks in general? The only time I have seen one in person, was a friend, that bought one back in 1996/97 or 98. He had three media's and one drive. After a couple of month's, one media failed, and the second one killed the drive. It was like that old story, were Zip disks are unreliable. It's just... Never ever seen or experienced any of those Zip failures. Only seen it with Jazz.

Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....

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Reply 51 of 51, by ab0tj

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brostenen wrote:

How stable and reliable are Jazz drives and disks in general? The only time I have seen one in person, was a friend, that bought one back in 1996/97 or 98. He had three media's and one drive. After a couple of month's, one media failed, and the second one killed the drive. It was like that old story, were Zip disks are unreliable. It's just... Never ever seen or experienced any of those Zip failures. Only seen it with Jazz.

I only have my drive to go by, but I've had zero issues over the course of a couple years. I did encounter the Zip drive click of death back when they were a current technology, though.