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Best way to copy 5.25 DOS games for future XP computer

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First post, by tcurt

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Argh. Second try at this post.

I am decomissioning my Frankenstein PC that has had too many different internals and run everything from DOS, OS/2, and Linux. It is a mess inside after all these years and not worth the trouble to continue using. But is does have a 5.25 floppy that I am keeping with the appropriate connectors.
I now have two other running computers: a year old XP system with a external 3.5 floppy, and a working Win95 machine with internal 3.5 and empty drive bay space.
I have alot of DOS games, including several on 5.25 disks that I want to play. I plan to install the 5.25 floppy into the Win95 machine, because the XP machine doesn't really have any way to attach it easily, and I figure that the Win95 enviroment will be the most friendly. Mostly likely some will just play as is on the Win95 machine, but I would prefer to make permanent copies/images of my 5.25 disk games and then move them to whatever machine will play them best.
Is this a good plan? I don't want to invest any more money into old software/hardware like this. Any suggestions for the best software to make these 5.25 copies that I can either play as is or sneakernet them on 3.5 disks to my XP machine and run under DosBox, etc? Have I overlooked anything? Thanks!

Reply 1 of 5, by gerwin

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Years ago I disposed of all my floppy disks, except for a few boot-disks.
Floppy disks are in my experience not a very safe way of storing data over many years, as they will develop bad data areas. The 5.1/4 disks I used to have seemed especially fragile.
I would advise you to copy all floppy disk contents to a hard disk, then put each game in a zip-archive.
If you have trouble getting the games from an old PC's harddisk to another PC I usually remove and install the entire harddisk in the newer PC, and then copy the files. I expect you can then burn all these zipped games on a single CD-R for backup.

I never encountered a game that insisted on being run from a floppy disk instead of a hard-drive (in contrast to the CD-checks of later games). Yet some installer utilities can refuse to install.

Reply 2 of 5, by tcurt

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I never encountered a game that insisted on being run from a floppy disk instead of a hard-drive (in contrast to the CD-checks of later games). Yet some installer utilities can refuse to install.

I have a couple I know of (Pirates and Test Drive 2) that either have to play off the disk or have the disk in the drive. Off the top of my head though, I just don't remember which games need the disk and which have a touchy installer. Rather than find out too late, I thought I could capture the images of all the 5.25 disks now in perfect form. It's overkill for most of the games, but better safe than sorry. There used to be something called CopyIIPC that folks used to facilitate making these images, but I was hoping there is something a little more modern.
True, I can just XCOPY every disk to the hard drive, but just having the files might not be of any use. Thanks!

Reply 3 of 5, by MiniMax

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Ultimate diskette recovery thread ???

DOSBox 60 seconds guide | How to ask questions
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Reply 4 of 5, by Davros

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gunship also needed the floppy disk in the drive (but that was a 3.5 disk)
because the copy protection was they used ascii char (3) a heart in the volume label

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Reply 5 of 5, by jthieme

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For keydisk games that require the floppy in the drive as a means of copy protection, just copying the files isn't going to work. You could try a virtual floppy drive on the XP machine and see if that would work:
http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/vfd.html

Another option would be to use some sort of anti copy protection program that bypass the floppy disk checks so you can run it from the hard drive without needing the floppy anymore. You can download a couple of older shareware programs that do this from the theunderdogs:

http://www.the-underdogs.info/faq2.php#d2

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