Comments on: Virtual Floppy Drive – Part III – Fun with HxC

By: venix_fan

venix_fan — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 12:19:53 +0000

Now that Venix seems to be free (public domain according to https://www.eskimo.com/~nickz/dec.html), would some kind soul share Venix/86 and/or Venix/286 or any Venix on Intel version install media or anything else related (like possibly even sources)? … Please. This OS deserves existence but it will vanish irrecoverably when the last private copies are lost, as was mine.

By: tenox

tenox — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 21:33:49 +0000

In reply to Raijinzrael.

Both of these links are covered inside my original post on different emulators: http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/?p=2471 it’s liknked from this post under “before”. I’ll add another one.

By: neozeed

neozeed — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 21:09:36 +0000

In reply to Raijinzrael.

appplications … – Submarine

Oh dear, I hope not nuclear… I can’t imagine things like that needing floppy disks, but you never know…

By: Raijinzrael

Raijinzrael — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 19:23:02 +0000

I found another recent floppy emulation device:

http://www.floppyemulator.com/products/

To me, looks like hardware is HxC, but the software looks like a rip-off from the one used on the indian emulator ver.3.0.

Probably someone should take a look on it, to check that they aren’t stealing opensource code, more taking on count that is selling very expensive.

/*—*/

Another legit floppy emulator (Not that flexible as the HxC).

http://www.datexdsm.com/emulator/docs/DTX200en.html.

They make emulators for other legacy devices, like ESDI disks ot CF, SCSI, etc…

By: dgunix

dgunix — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 14:27:46 +0000

In reply to tenox.

hehe, once can only hope.
I think that the Intel based ones only work on the Pentium series.
Also found this on wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviion
“This resulted in a second series of Aviion machines based first on the Pentium..”

But I’m biased, as I edited both AViiON and ‘DG/UX’ entries in Wikipedia.

By: tenox

tenox — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 20:32:10 +0000

In reply to Jeff. BTW I just realized you are THE Jeff! Thank so much for developing and supporting such wonderful device! I can see it now as invaluable in the retrocomputing community!

By: tenox

tenox — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 19:59:10 +0000

In reply to Jeff. Can you point me to some TD0/IMD images worth testing? Especially copy protected ones.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 18:11:03 +0000

In reply to Michal Necasek. Yes it support Teledisk (TD0) and ImageDisk (IMD) type images. In fact you can try this right now by downloading the software and load some TD0/IMD images.

By: Michal Necasek

Michal Necasek — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 13:09:05 +0000

Now here’s a question… how well do these disk emulators handle non-standard formats? Say, the OS/2 XDF images? Or copy protected Lotus 1-2-3 disks?

Or to put it differently, can they handle what a Teledisk image can?

By: Michal Necasek

Michal Necasek — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 13:06:42 +0000

In reply to tenox. Yeah, 640K definitely isn't enough for OS/2 1.3. To be fair, I think it's a lot newer than most of the other OSes there. The listed minimum RAM requirement was 2MB RAM, though that included the DOS box. For OS/2 1.0 the listed minimum was 1.5MB RAM without DOS box (or 2MB with). Not sure what the real minimum requirement was. I think in the early OS/2 betas the minimum requirement was 512K, but IIRC they soon upped it to 1MB as the system was probably unusable with so little RAM anyway.