Wanted to give this an 8yr old bump. Anyone know of anything these days for a virtual drive in 9x? VFD works starting in 2000/ME and someone at Stack said FileImage works but it’s not for me... thanks

TVR wrote on 2020-06-13, 01:03:

Wanted to give this an 8yr old bump. Anyone know of anything these days for a virtual drive in 9x? VFD works starting in 2000/ME and someone at Stack said FileImage works but it’s not for me... thanks

I would get a Gotek and call it a day . Even if there is virtual floppy software that runs under Windows 9x , it will be of no use under pure DOS, where it would be most useful anyway, IMHO .

thanks for the reply Darry, I’m using and loving a Gotek atm. I just haven’t flashed it (yet) so I need to extract all my images that aren’t 1.44 and put them on the usb. Seems most of my games are 720k. It would be nice to stick my image library on my CF card and just mount them as needed like we can do with ISO’s!

It’s odd (sort of not really) that there’s a great virtual floppy drive for DOS and Windows 2000/ME through 10 but 9x just doesn’t seem to have one. The guy who made the wonderful SHSUCD made a floppy version for DOS and it works great it’s just sorta useless for anything that requires in-game disk swaps, really need a gui w background tasks for that!

TVR wrote on 2020-06-13, 01:29:

It’s odd (sort of not really) that there’s a great virtual floppy drive for DOS and Windows 2000/ME through 10 but 9x just doesn’t seem to have one.

Same with virtual COM ports / null-modem emulation.
Windows XP has great support for this, for example, while 9x totally "sucks" on this matter as much as Linux does.
In fact, this forced me to be creative* and develop myself a hardware solution:
Using a duo USB serial adapter with a 3-wire null modem "cable". 😀

(* Not really, just kidding. About everyone will think about this workaround at some point, I believe..)

TVR wrote on 2020-06-13, 01:22:

thanks for the reply Darry, I’m using and loving a Gotek atm. I just haven’t flashed it (yet) so I need to extract all my images that aren’t 1.44 and put them on the usb. Seems most of my games are 720k. It would be nice to stick my image library on my CF card and just mount them as needed like we can do with ISO’s!

Put flashfloppy on and you can do just that. And add a drive noise speaker!

pii_legacy wrote on 2020-06-13, 09:20:

TVR wrote on 2020-06-13, 01:22:

thanks for the reply Darry, I’m using and loving a Gotek atm. I just haven’t flashed it (yet) so I need to extract all my images that aren’t 1.44 and put them on the usb. Seems most of my games are 720k. It would be nice to stick my image library on my CF card and just mount them as needed like we can do with ISO’s!

Put flashfloppy on and you can do just that. And add a drive noise speaker!

I second that! FlashFlappy can handle various formats. Much better than the bad default firmware, IMHO, that's crippled on prupose (you're forced to buy a separate 720KB version if you don't use 1,44MB images.)
With FlashFloppy, only the PC's floppy controller is the limit (XTs often have a max. floppy controller bandwith of 250 Kb/s, while AT's can handle 500 Kb/s or higher).

There was a vfloppy driver by symantec but their ftp was possibly the only place to download it and it seems to be down and there was also a vfloppy software that build on that driver. The link to it was on a thailandese forum and the posts are also deleted by now. Here is a link the thread i got the info from:https://msfn.org/board/topic/132663-virtual-f … ive-for-win-95/

FreeDOS has a mirror of SHSUFDRV. Included docs say it is not Win9x compatible though.

https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/fr … l/shsufdrv.html

I happen to have been looking for something to mount floppies too, and I must say I think it's very odd-ball for Windows 9x to not have an easily obtainable software that does this. There's Alcohol 120% that mounts CDs, and there's Daemon Tools too, but I definitely did not hear about mounting floppy images until the XP days (most likely VFD ). A few other 90s OSes win in this department, apparently.

I saw darthron's link about vfd_folders.exe, but I can't find it either 🤣. Symantec apparently shut down that FTP server at the end of 2019. I don't know if anybody has an archive of this.

I remembered about WinImage, and thats basicly a half-way there solution. It does open/extract floppy images and allows you to edit them, but I did not see a way to mount them.

I did a mini-cram session on MS-DOS earlier this year and found fakedisk.com (packaged in fakedisk.zip). It works pretty well on DOS, and this is either a half-way there or full solution, depending on what you're trying to do on your Win box. If you use it in a DOS window, an image mounts onto A: on DOS! Now, if you open File Explorer and open A: there, you still get the "A:\ is not accessible" error. I think this happens because fakedisk.com is using the 13H interrupt, while File Explorer is using the protected WinAPI for all file management. WinAPI uses its own protected mode drivers instead of calling the BIOS. Once those are running, we can't call the BIOS anymore. APPEND doesn't exist on MS-DOS 7. I tried SUBST, and that did mount a drive icon in File Explorer, but I got "not accessible" there too.

I also did Shutdown to MS-DOS and tested it there; it worked fine. I was able mount an image to both A: and B:, btw. Now, here's an interesting thing I did: I kept the images mounted, went back to C:\ and typed WIN. Now when Windows started up, it gave a warning that a TSR (fakedisk.com) was running and is taking some memory (you can see more details on this in C:\WIN\Ios.log). Now, when I went into File Explorer and opened A:\, I saw the files! There was no icon for B:\, though. When I typed to go there, I got "B:\ is not accessible". I think B:\ on Windows would only work I have a 2nd physical floppy drive in there. You also shouldn't try to swap disk images in a DOS window, here. Once you do that, A:\ is not accessible again.

So basicly, if you're in a DOS window or in DOS mode, fakedisk.com should work fine, and you can automate with batch scripts. If you are trying to start into Windows with new images mounted and ready to go, I suggest trying to modify AUTOEXEC.BAT, so that this loads up before Windows. I don't recall if this can be placed into CONFIG.SYS as well. Getting fakedisk.com to access and lock into INT 13H services early on forces Windows's IOS process to fallback to just using the BIOS drivers instead of the Windows ones during startup. That's the basic gist of how this workaround seems to work.

So in case someone were trying to make a replacement for vfd_folders.exe, or a Win9x version of VFD on 2000+ (or getting fakedisk.com to fully work on Windows), I guess getting some WinAPI hook in there to redirect calls to INT 13H could be one way to pull this off?

I tried looking for FileImage, but Google isn't helping me there, so idk what to say about this one.

Another workaround I can give would be to mount the images on a newer OS, share the mounts to Win98 over the network, and get Win98 to mount these as a mapped drive shares. Of course this method can start getting involved if you don't have the right network configuration or the right file-sharing services ready to go for this.

Really appreciate your efforts there vzz, very helpful. I am going to give this fakedisk a go when I get some time.

Just in case anyone else is looking, I found it here, https://www.sac.sk/files.php?d=14&l=F

I've also been looking for "vfd_folders.exe" for a while now and haven't been able to find it. Has anyone run into this file yet?

My use case is to run one those compressed driver programs that always want to write to a floppy disk instead of allow you to extract the files. I don't always have a floppy drive connected, so this is very annoying. A virtual floppy drive would be great.