DivByZero wrote on 2025-06-08, 12:14:

With the speed good enough now, it makes me wonder how hard it'd be to hack MSCDEX.EXE to read from a CD image on the mounted drive

No need to hack MSCDEX - just use SHSUCDHD+SHSUCDX.

Make sure you use the latest versions:
SHSUCDHD 3.01 (17 May, 2005)
SHSUCDX 3.09 (2 September, 2022)

I had some issues with some earlier stuff, but the above were working fine.

so we could have swappable CD images from network storage

Depends what you mean as "swappable".
I'm afraid there's no way to change the images while playing a game - so no multi-CD games.

does it allow you to load multiple instances of the driver? I know the tex murphy games for example would let you pick a different drive letter for each game disc

DivByZero wrote on 2025-06-08, 12:14:

This may sound odd, but until I read your post, I hadn't thought of running large late DOS games directly from the drive. I've mainly used it to shunt files on and off the machine. With the speed good enough now, it makes me wonder how hard it'd be to hack MSCDEX.EXE to read from a CD image on the mounted drive, so we could have swappable CD images from network storage. Of course, analog CD audio wouldn't work so it probably wouldn't be much use in practice.

It’s fantastic having all your game ISO’s on the network (I use SHSUCDHD + SHSUCDX). Huge space saving with DOS machines being so limited in local disk storage. Even though I have the original CDs, the period correct CDROMs are really miss and hit these days. Sometimes CDs can be read sometimes they can’t. Depends how the CDROM drive is feeling on the day 😉

The ultimate though would be to use NETDRIVE + play IPX network games at the same time (which appears to be impossible to have TCP and IPX running at the moment). I haven’t had a chance to try this yet Re: mTCP NetDrive: network attached storage for DOS 2.0 or better

maxtherabbit wrote on 2025-06-08, 13:24:

does it allow you to load multiple instances of the driver? I know the tex murphy games for example would let you pick a different drive letter for each game disc

Up to 24 drive letters are available all from the same driver. The memory requirements grow slightly with each allocated drive letter - less than 100 bytes.

On a normal system, that's 23 or less drive letters that are actually available. To get all 24 drive letters you would have to boot from a floppy drive and not have a hard drive.

I have a vague memory that I read that some NetWare redirectors would let you get a few extra drive mappings in by having some non-letter "drive letters", e.g. perhaps "::"? I can imagine lots of software wouldn't like that much though!

NetDrive server console shows something like:

2025-06-11 11:07:30 New Session: 48027, Addr: 192.168.0.102:8272, Protocol: 2, Image: test2g.dsk (RO) Journal type: No Journal

What's that "Protocol: 2"? NetDrive protocol version?
UDP would be 17, 2 suggests IGMP - but it doesn't make sense here.

It's the NetDrive server protocol version number.

There are two different version numbers:

• One between the device driver and the command line utility program. Those must match exactly.
• One between the DOS side (device driver/command line utility program) and server. The server should support the most recent versions of the DOS code.