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.

Just for giggles I tried NetDrive under Windows 98. It worked. Kind of ..

• I told the BIOS of the machine that IRQ 10 was reserved for an ISA card.
• I disabled (but not deleted) the NE2000 card through the device manager.
• I added Netdrive to CONFIG.SYS.
• I loaded the NE2000 packet driver and connected a drive letter to a remote machine in AUTOEXEC.BAT.

That worked, and I was able to browse the network drive, run programs from it, etc. It had side effects though:

• Windows complained about the DOS device driver and told me performance would be degraded.
• Drivers for my IDE adapter did not load, so Windows was using whatever BIOS support was available.
• I lost the CD-ROM device and drive letter as a result of the IDE drivers not loading.

Windows was not happy about the DOS device driver.

Does anybody want to write a Vxd? : - )

I tried it with 98SE with BootGUI=0, with a PCI NIC...

Running "WIN" normally caused instant crash - pretty much expected, two drivers trying to control one device is never a good idea.

After turning off the NIC in Windows, I was able to run "WIN" after "NETDRIVE CONNECT...", but any attempts to access the remote drive failed.

I only got it working correctly in Safe Mode - "WIN /D:M".
Well, mostly correctly - I've set the disk image as RO ("chmod 444"), but Windows always tries to mark its territory by writing something wherever it can - so I kept getting occasional "Write Error" messages.

mbbrutman wrote on 2025-06-19, 00:43:

I lost the CD-ROM device and drive letter as a result of the IDE drivers not loading.

I suppose it should be possible to address this by installing DOS CD-ROM drivers too?

Are the complains about performance annoying, e.g. they pop up on every boot? If so, I'm tempted to see if I can find any advice in old TechNet CDs about registry changes to make the complaints go away.

Nice to hear it works though, I always thought this sort of thing should be possible somehow.

I didn't think to bother with the DOS drivers for the CD-ROM, as that would probably lead to other problems.

I suspect Windows got mad because it saw a block mode device driver, so it thought that all bets were off and just went into "dumb" mode. Or maybe it's a problem with that specific IDE driver. Which is funny because it knows which drive letters the device drivers are assigned too. (Or perhaps it was a different conflict ... who knows ...)

mbrrutman:

I've been using NetDrive quite extensively as a storage solution for my Olivetti M28 as it only has a 20mb harddrive. I do see some programs which crashes when run from a netdrive drive letter, like Windows 3.0 and Prince of Persia. Windows 3.0 I wanted to test just for giggles, and I was not too surprised it didn't start correctly.

Both btw load fine when done from the harddrive on C:.

Prince of Persia gives a "System error" and quits to DOS and then nothing on D: (the netdrive drive letter) is accessible. It looks like the network connection doesn't work any longer (/DIR just gives error).

Any suggestions on what might be happening?

vetz wrote on 2025-06-23, 11:23:

mbrrutman: […]
Show full quote

mbrrutman:

I've been using NetDrive quite extensively as a storage solution for my Olivetti M28 as it only has a 20mb harddrive. I do see some programs which crashes when run from a netdrive drive letter, like Windows 3.0 and Prince of Persia. Windows 3.0 I wanted to test just for giggles, and I was not too surprised it didn't start correctly.

Both btw load fine when done from the harddrive on C:.

Prince of Persia gives a "System error" and quits to DOS and then nothing on D: (the netdrive drive letter) is accessible. It looks like the network connection doesn't work any longer (/DIR just gives error).

Any suggestions on what might be happening?

Try the read-ahead version Re: mTCP NetDrive: network attached storage for DOS 2.0 or better

vetz wrote on 2025-06-23, 11:23:

mbrrutman: […]
Show full quote

mbrrutman:

I've been using NetDrive quite extensively as a storage solution for my Olivetti M28 as it only has a 20mb harddrive. I do see some programs which crashes when run from a netdrive drive letter, like Windows 3.0 and Prince of Persia. Windows 3.0 I wanted to test just for giggles, and I was not too surprised it didn't start correctly.

Both btw load fine when done from the harddrive on C:.

Prince of Persia gives a "System error" and quits to DOS and then nothing on D: (the netdrive drive letter) is accessible. It looks like the network connection doesn't work any longer (/DIR just gives error).

Any suggestions on what might be happening?

Can you run "netdrive status d:" and report the number of retry errors? Do the retry errors consistently increase as you are trying the DIR command?

If you explicitly disconnect the drive can you ping the NetDrive server? (If you can then this tells me that the packet driver and network card are still functional.)

I suspect that your network is dropping a UDP packet on occasion, and that is fine - NetDrive will retry. But Windows or a game are probably taking over the DOS critical error handler and hiding it from you, so if you lose the same packet three times in a row the device driver can't ask you "Abort, Retry, Ignore" and things go out of sync. So seeing the retry count go up will confirm that.

You can also try setting this environment variable first before you connect to drive D: "set NETDRIVE_RETRIES=10" . That will make it more aggressive about retrying before giving up and reporting an error.

"Set NETDRIVE_TIMEOUT=1" can also be tried - it will make the device driver time out and retry more quickly; if the problem is related to things taking too long that might help.

Mike