My old 3.5 floppy game disks are still readable. Some are from the 80s. I don't have a 5.25 drive anymore so I haven't tried any of those for years.

The disks that seem to fail are some of the store bought blanks.

I had about 50 aol floppies collected at one point for blanks but all of them eventually went bad. 😁 On AOL u could just request they mail a disk so I frequently did hahah.

1. Yes. Floppy jackets and isolation rule so much. Lazy pessimists think there's no hope for these (and older CD-Rs too) because they probably fail to follow the common advice on the jackets or media box. 😀

2. I don't know about that one. You'll have to try imaging the disk normally first then try the TSR while mounting the said floppy image in a vm (that isn't dosbox). Not guaranteed to work though

I bought some old SSI RPGs on ebay last year. One of them was "Champions of Krynn", on 5.25" disks. I bought an ancient FDD drive on ebay too, just to see if the disks were OK. The drive heads needed a clean, but after that was done, the disks worked great. (I talked about this topic on Vogons here.)

Edit: When I bought these old games, they looked fairly well looked after. They were boxed, and the disks were in their dust jackets.

As others have said, it depends on how you have stored them. I sold my Atari 800 just a few years ago, but discs from 1983 were still readable nearly 25 years later. They had all been kept in sleeves and in the closet away from direct sunlight.

The ones I had the most trouble reading years later were the ones on my Amiga. It used a non standard formatting to get higher capacity out of 720k floppies and that seemed to cause issues. I also had an Atari ST from the same time frame as the Amiga and had no issues with those discs. The non-originals were from the same brand, verbatim and maxell, yet one system could still read them, the other had issues with some.

leileilol wrote:

2. I don't know about that one. You'll have to try imaging the disk normally first then try the TSR while mounting the said floppy image in a vm (that isn't dosbox). Not guaranteed to work though

Part of the problem there is I don't know if I even have the TSR any more; if I do then it's on one of the (hopefully normally-formatted) floppies in my collection.

Thanks everyone for the thoughts and advice.

HunterZ wrote:

Part of the problem there is I don't know if I even have the TSR any more

Part of the problem has been solved!

About a year ago I noticed that an old P120 system I have has the correct hookups for a 5 1/4" floppy drive, and a much older programming friend of mine over the internet had an old hi-density 5 1/4" drive kicking around that he didn't need, so he sent it to me, I installed it, and spent a few hours backing up ALL of my 5 1/4" disks. Of the about 50+ disks I had to go through, only about 5 of them had read errors, which to be honest, is crazy. I've had far more troubles with 3 1/2" disks than 5 1/4".

There is one VERY important thing you need to keep in mind though. If you write to a low-density 5 1/4" disk in a hi-density drive, you may make it impossible to ever read that disk again in a low-density drive. Has to do with the size of the read and write heads of the two drive types and the way the data is written. So long as you're not writing any data at all to any of your disks, then don't worry about that.

Good luck getting a 5 1/4" drive working though if you don't have an older system with the correct hookups. I think it's possible to get converters, but if the system is too new then the BIOS won't even recognize the drive type. :P

I have a 5.25" / 3.5" combo drive installed in one of my XP systems on an ASUS Neo 2 mother board. When using Floppy Image 1.5.2 the program seems to expect a larger capacity disk so it never completes the imaging. Instead I use Virtual Floppy Drive to make a blank image and copy the files. So far it has worked for my games. I still have a bunch of unlabeled disks I have to go through one day.

I've had a few 3.5" disks that I couldn't get 1 file from. As for 5.25" disks the ones I tried were readable. There was Sega All-Time Smash Hits, though. Those must have been compressed or something. I can get the files but they're nothing I recognize.

lei: You're my hero! I did find a copy of FM80.COM from a backup of some ancient hard disks, but I may need or have better luck with the stuff you posted.

Gemini: The 8 MHz 286 clone that our family had when I was a kid had two 5.25" floppy drives: one hi-density 1.2MB and one double-density 360KB. I do remember sometimes having to try 360KB disks in both drives due to issues, but it wasn't quite that cut-and-dry.

Also, I do have both types of drives laying around still I think, as well has ribbon cables and PII-450 and AMD64 X2 systems with floppy support on their motherboards.

SKAR: Ideally I'd like to get as close as possible to 1:1 images of the commercial game disks (I have some booters and copy-protected games), and non-imaged copies of the individual files from non-commercial/non-original disks.

My AMD64 X2 system is still running (migrated from XP to Ubuntu as the primary OS last weekend, as XP was getting cranky and I didn't feel like doing a reinstall) and has a still-working 3.5" 1.44MB floppy drive in it. Maybe I should start my floppy project by going through my collection of 3.5" floppies, which is smaller anyways because I didn't have a computer with a 3.5" drive until a couple years before CD-ROM's took over.

HunterZ wrote:

lei: You're my hero!...

Err...heroine! 😁

Hmmm...my oldest floppy disks are from 1989 - Simcity classic. Disks still work perfectly. Others are mostly from the 1990-1991. Like Midwinter, Space 1889, Champions of Krynn, Eye of the Beholder 1, Wing Commander 1 & 2, etc. All work well.

Yes, all are maintained in their sleeves, and placed in their respective boxes.

I feather-dust my collections once every 3 days. I've made backups of all my games on cds and hard drives, anyway. But the feeling of inserting the floopy disk into the drive, waiting for ages to install the game, disk by disk and playing the games, is priceless!

I also clean my floppy drives once in 2 months or once in 6 weeks, but sometimes much longer.

My DOOM2 backup copy which I made on 5x 3.5" Sony disks back in 1995 still work.

EDIT : I just don't know what happened to my Karateka, Lode Runner, MS Flight Simulator 4.0, Zaxxon, Test Drive 2, Blockout, Alleycat, Tapper, Dig-dug, and Starflight disks. Couldn't find them after returning from my pre-uni college those days. Sigh. Double Sigh. (Sometimes, you can't even trust your cousins! 😁)

Malik wrote:

EDIT : I just don't know what happened to my Karateka, Lode Runner, MS Flight Simulator 4.0, Zaxxon, Test Drive 2, Blockout, Alleycat, Tapper, Dig-dug, and Starflight disks. Couldn't find them after returning from my pre-uni college those days. Sigh. Double Sigh. (Sometimes, you can't even trust your cousins! 😁)

Starflight (PC EGA version on two 360KB 5.25" disks) was my first boxed PC game. I still have the box and its contents, including the original disks, codewheel, map, manual and installation/quickstart card. Same for Starflight 2, except its box got a bit smashed over the years due to being thicker and padded inside with weak plastic...

I've got pirated copies of Karateka, Zaxxon, Test Drive 2, Alleycat and possibly Tapper in my floppy collection.

I also have original floppies of MS-DOS 1.0 in a pink IBM binder case (minus the grey shell) that someone gave me at one point, like this one:

HunterZ wrote:

I'd like to get as close as possible to 1:1 images of the commercial game disks (I have some booters and copy-protected games)

I have a few games that are protected and I'm still looking for a way to make a working copy. The most I've managed to do is free it up with some old patching programs once it's installed.

That's probably the best that can realistically be achieved, as they often worked by formatting a sector on the floppy in a different way and then marking it as bad in the FAT so that it wouldn't be copied by most programs (and may not be supported by floppy imagers and/or DOSBox either). The game would know how to tell the drive to read the sector so that it could verify that it was not a copy.

I remember using a program called rawcopy back in the day that could sometimes make 1:1 copies of those types of disks, but that won't help when making images.

How about:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Copy-II-PC-Central-Point- … =item4153ff98e2

or

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Central-Point-Copy-II-P … =item4153725f16

Just ordered, less than $20.00
http://kalron-inc.amazonwebstore.com/Central- … /B003VLBUNG.htm?

Let us know how it works out 😎

*

PS: also found this little site, with some copy2pc stuff, among other floppy related things...

Maybe the older versions would sometimes work better, due to the 'weakening' they mention(?)

http://retro.icequake.net/dob/

My floppy disks range from the late 1980's onwards and they still work fine (all Amiga games, utils, demo's and apps etc...). They've spent their years stored in disk boxes.

I'm getting closer to wading through my old floppies. I've got my PIII-550 with Win98 up and running (getting hard to find a modern web browser and free antivirus for Win98! Ended up with Opera and ClamWin respectively) and it's able to read 3.5" floppies. Will have to dig through my 5.25" drive collection to find a good one.

What is the best program for Win9x or DOS for ripping floppies to DOSBox-mountable image files?

I'm thinking of booting FreeDOS from CD-ROM for some copying and undelete activities.

Update: Finally figured out a workaround for Ubuntu 10.10's floppy mounting issues and have been using the dd utility to painlessly create 3.5" disk images instead of trying to do it on my Win98 machine. I was able to get Double Dragon III and Lemmings images to mount in DOSBox, with Lemmings of course not working due to the copy protection (which I guess is hopeless to try to defeat via copying instead of cracking?). Double Dragon III has crappy gameplay but I had never heard the MT-32 music before - it seems to have a decent (although sparse) soundtrack due to being one of the later MT-32 games.

I still have to decide how to deal with 5.25" disks when the time comes, as neither of my old machines has a 5.25" drive in it at the moment (but I do have some in the closet that I can hook up). I will probably have to do at least some of that using the Win98 machine because of the FormatMaster-formatted disks.