If I move Win16 to DOSBox-X, can I do the disk compression? If so, how?

floppy disk images are tiny in relation to modern drive sizes. Is it really that important to compress them?

Regarding dosbox-x, it does not support such compressed floppy disk images either.
It does supports zip compressed folders for the C: drive. But I think those will be read-only unless you have an overlay which is read-write.
In any case, I have never personally used the feature, so don't know all the details.

I don't need floppies. I just like using them. 😀

Back in the day I never used "compressed floppies", just .zip archives (or better .arj and .rar). ARJ and RAR support splitting big archives onto multiple floppy disks, which was very handy.

Azarien wrote on 2022-12-28, 19:31:

Back in the day I never used "compressed floppies", just .zip archives (or better .arj and .rar). ARJ and RAR support splitting big archives onto multiple floppy disks, which was very handy.

Same here, I use normal, uncompressed images mostly.
And as an exception, Nero NRG as a proprietary format for archiving CD-ROMs. 😉

When my HDD space runs out, I used to use hard disk compression, however.
Either on file system basis (DOS/Win 9x, DriveSpace) or on OS basis (Win NT, NTFS file compression).

I use a lot of floppies for my different computers. I like compressing things and putting them on floppies. I think it's because of what I gain by compressing them. Using floppies, especially compressed, will also help with low hard drive space issues.

Jo22 wrote on 2022-12-28, 21:22:

When my HDD space runs out, I used to use hard disk compression, however.
Either on file system basis (DOS/Win 9x, DriveSpace) or on OS basis (Win NT, NTFS file compression).

I never used DriveSpace because it was horribly slow (at least on those machines I've seen using it) and it ate some ridiculous amounts of DOS memory. I kept my DOS memory quite optimized despite loading a number of drivers and TSRs.
But I did use NTFS file compression (on particular files and folders) a lot during XP era and beyond. At this point performance impact became negligible and conventional memory no longer mattered.
I may still have some NTFS-compressed folders on Windows 10, carried with partitions cloned to bigger and bigger disks and SSDs, as I never really cared to uncompress them.

Harry Potter wrote on 2022-12-29, 15:17:

I use a lot of floppies for my different computers. I like compressing things and putting them on floppies. I think it's because of what I gain by compressing them. Using floppies, especially compressed, will also help with low hard drive space issues.

Buy do you mean DriveSpace(or alike) transparently compressed floppies, or just regular archive files put onto them?

On my Win98SE computer at my mother's house, I use DriveSpace. It is kind of slow, especially on the drive check done before compressing a drive. On my DOS laptop there, I use JAM. It is limited but provides a good compression ratio. On my more modern computers, I use WinMount. Unfortunately, it requires enough free drive space to store a temporary file, so I created a batch file to copy the file to a temporary folder, mount it from there, and when I'm done, replace the original file.

Can I compress floppy disks for Win3.1 under DOSBox or DOSBox-X? I have WinMount to do the job, but it is native to my Win11/64 laptop and, if I want to switch disks, I need to exit the emulator, unmount the floppy, mount a new floppy and then restart the emulator. It's okay for a DOS program, as I would be exiting the program before swapping disks anyway, but I want to be able to switch floppies within the emulator. I have a Win16 emulation under DOSBox but can set it up in DOSBox-X if necessary.

DOSBox-X allows changing (or swapping) disks from the menus (when running in windowed mode) while running a program, such as Win3.1. This assumes a floppy is mounted before you start the DOS program.

There is also support for mounting zipped folders as drives, but as already mentioned, not zipped disk images.

I can use zipped folders, but I have a problem: I might want to modify the zipped folder. In my experience, when I use WinMount to compress floppies, sometimes there's not enough space for the temporary update file on the floppy. 🙁 I want to be able to modify, say, a 1MB zip file and add 10k of data to it without getting an Out of Disk Space error. BTW, how do I mount a zip file as a drive?

mounting zip folders will result in read-only disks. You will not be able to modify the contents. A possible work-around would be to use the overlay feature, but I have not personally used it.

Oh. I really want to modify a compressed floppy's contents, not just read them.

I used to have a Win7/64 laptop at a day program with a password-protected Administrator's account and couldn't install anything on it. That problem is fixed now, but before that, I was able to get WinMount running but not fully installed. To use WinMount floppies, I had to create a batch file that decompresses the floppies to a folder on the desktop, wait then, when finished, recompress it back to the floppy. Maybe I can do the same for my Win16 emulation. I have both PKZip and DOSRAR somewhere or, if I can't find them, Google them. Is there a better command-line program to compress files in that way?

I believe I have both PKZip and DOSRAR, and, if I don't, I can Google them. Does anybody here know of a better DOS utility to compress and decompress files?

I can Google Stacker. Can I use it to compress real floppies under DOSBox-X and Win16? What about mounted hard drives? I am familiar with the config.sys file.

You can do whatever craziness you want to do. Ask DOSBox-X questions on the DOSBOX-X github site.
Closed.