VOGONS


First post, by keropi

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Hiya!

as per title I am hoping a kind soul will upload an image of the driver/utility disk that came with the Roland SCC-1 card 😊
thanks!

🎵 🎧 PCMIDI MPU , OrpheusII , Action Rewind , Megacard and 🎶GoldLib soundcard website

Reply 2 of 7, by keropi

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thanks a mil! that will do just fine 😀

but why have disk images? with the right software you can use .img files from DOS all the way up to win7/x64 😀

🎵 🎧 PCMIDI MPU , OrpheusII , Action Rewind , Megacard and 🎶GoldLib soundcard website

Reply 3 of 7, by fronzel

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I do have many iso images, but i find floppy images terrible. For iso you can open them quite easily with winrar and usually its only one file. But floppies have the bad habit of having low capacity and when i see someone proudly bringing me Office 4.3 Professional on like 50 IMG floppy images i could start crying.

Maybe its good in dosbox, never tried that, thankfully never needed to. Probably you can work with it easily.

But for me personally i NEVER need floppy images as i dont wanna create floppies. i dont want virtual floppies i just want the files. When i install old software on my laptops i usually just throw the files on a CF and thats it. So if i get a handful of IMG or IMA files i obviously need to extract it and that's where the whole tragedy starts imho. unlike iso IMG and IMA are not really standards but just funny extensions the creators of countless disk imaging tools invented. Maybe one of them is even a standard, but obviously not standard enough to rely on it.

Most of the times i can even read them with winimage, but if i can't then i'm really screwed as that means it has probably been made with some obscure proprietary software i will probably never have. And even with winimage its not really fun to extract a dozen of floppy image files.

If there is some proper reason like some copy protection scheme or other "unreadable" parts on the disk i understand that an image is a good solution, otherwise i regard them as a real disadvantage unless you are someone who really enjoys creating physical floppy disks from image files.

Reply 4 of 7, by jaqie

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I call it flip flopping discs. whether it's 20 fdds (or fdd images) or 5 cds (or isos) I just can't stand it either. I see zero reason for images in this day and age except for boot media.

Try installing sims 2 plus expansions sometime if you feel rather masochistic... even from isos it's terrible and there should be no reason for it.

Reply 5 of 7, by keropi

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Dunno, I find uncompressed .img files very easy to use...
* use HD-COPY to create and restore them in anything that runs DOS
* UltraISO to FULLY manipulate them under any version of windows.
* freeware "floppy image 1.52" to write said images with any windows version available (both 32 and 64bit and with any floppy drive you have, either classic or usb one)

It just works and if you are trying to make images from your game floppies it's usually the only way unless you want to mess with pkzip/dos and using it's label restoration options... it's meh when you can make a quick image with hd-copy and restore it in either DOS or windows easily.

I find this combo working perfectly fine for me but you are free to use whatever works for you 😀 , I am thankfull for feeling my request 😊

🎵 🎧 PCMIDI MPU , OrpheusII , Action Rewind , Megacard and 🎶GoldLib soundcard website

Reply 6 of 7, by Great Hierophant

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Although I don't use the same programs, I second what keropi said. There is nothing so easy as to image floppy disks or create them when you need to install something on a vintage PC. While some game installation programs will work without needing to be on a floppy, many more will not. It is also important to note that making a disk image preserves file date stamps and the volume name. As an archival tool, it cannot be beat for simplicity and ease of use. It is also standard as it is just a straight sector dump, nothing extra is added.

There is no difference, structurally, between IMA and IMG images, but DOSBox requires the file's extension to be .img to boot an image.

While it can be annoying, the important thing about installing from original floppy images is so that you get the install right, especially for older games. If you want to install a game ideally supporting VGA graphics, like Wing Commander, but want to play it with EGA or Tandy graphics for whatever reason, you have to use the install program to "convert" the graphics files when you install it to a hard drive.

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Reply 7 of 7, by fronzel

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If there are cases where it is really required to have each disk on a physical or virtual floppy i of course support the idea - may it be due to copy protection or just a very stubborn installer.

However, from my experience about 98% of all appz and games installed fine if you just haul all files from all disks in one folder. On one side my laptops besides two of them don't have a physical floppy anyways. On the other side why should i create a dozen physical floppies? Even in DOS box i find it more relaxing to not play a disc jockey if i can avoid it, i just fail to see the benefit of it. Maybe it's just because i got PCMCIA in all of my laptops. If you only got a floppy drive there's probably not much choice. Meh, I'm just lazy i guess. Don't really like floppies, maybe i had to use them for too long and had too many with bad sectors and always the slowest floppy drive of them all. Maybe its also because i recently downloaded some old "non standard" image that could not be opened with winimage, ultraiso or any other tools again. Probably created with some old proprietary app where the author thought that "img is a neat extension ofr my images". If i still find it imma upload it for you experts if you wanna chew on it.

Anyways, it's great not everyone got the same taste, otherwise the world would be boring. I guess there's floppy people and then there's people like me who rather prefer to avoid it at any cost.