twiz11 wrote on 2023-11-02, 19:54:
this is cool i hope to see this added to dosbox for better emulation of old games from the 80s
I doubt it could be built in to DosBox without a lot of changes (to DosBox) - IMD accesses the floppy controller directly and in some very non-standard
ways - this is why it pretty much only runs under DOS - DosBox runs under another OS (my experience is mostly with the Winblows version, which won't
allow an application direct access to the floppy hardware (and interrupts) without loads of special permissions and drivers - my guess - I've never really
tried/looked into it that much .. but seems how Win works with most system hardware).
On the plus side, I did publish a DOS bootable floppy image (which you could make into a bootable CD) allowing you to run IMD on most any system
having bootable removable media (and since it works with floppy drives - you would likely have at least that 😀
That boot floppy creates a RamDisk big enough to hold images, and includes DDLINK a simple tool to transfer files to
other systems via Lan, Serial or Parallel - DDLINK runs well under DosBox which gives a way to easily move images to/from
more modern OS's. - So to read/write disk without a DOS system:
Connect one system to another (Serial or LAN)
Run DosBox on one system.. start DDLINK as a server.
Boot IMD on the other system
Use DDLINK to get images to write
run IMD to read/write
use DDLINK to put images read
And FWIW - IMD isn't needed to RUN games - just to read/write old diskettes to/from .IMD files
DosBox could support MOUNTing .IMDs
but .. IMDU can convert a .IMD to a pure binary/raw disk image, which DosBox CAN mount.
Only potential problem I see with that approach is that the binary image won't have format data
which may be used in a copy protect scheme - Support for .IMD could help, but the better ways
of diskette copy protection often rely on intentional errors which IMD may not be able to record
and represent well enough for it to work.
Dave Dunfield ::: https://dunfield.themindfactory.com
or: "Daves Old Computers" -> Personal (near bottom)
