It’s the ‘not quite ISO9660’ format that Microsoft was using at the time. Which really is quite annoying as either I preserve the image as it was, but you are correct anything modern will refuse to read it, as it’s got junk in the headder, and it’s just not ‘right’. Meanwhile MSCDEX will read it just fine.

Daemon tools + Windows will read it, although in my case, I just used a MS-DOS VM + Network share to copy the CD off of, and then mounted it about 50 times in dosbox to extract the contents.

At any rate the files are in a 7z file named msbookshelf91.7z over on archive.org

I’ve had this issue with quite a few CD-ROM’s dating from the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. The CSRG set are another that mount incorrectly on Windows, but fine on Linux/BSD.

Tried to mount/burn the image, but unfortunately, I can’t read that MDF file without a Windows machine. Neither Disk Utility.app nor mdf2iso 0.3.0 support this MDF (version?) only unpacking with Unarchiver.app works. Would it be possible for you to upload a CUE/TOC/BIN file or anything similar less proprietary? Or at least an older MDF that works with mdf2iso 😉

Regards.

Yes, years ago I’d written a TSR specifically to dump the data from the MSPL by dumping the contents of the text buffer to a file, hitting page down, and repeating the process. It took a while but after all of that work I now had an ASCII version of the MSPL aptly named “Microsoft Programmers Library.7z“, in which I can search or index or do whatever I want on a modern machine.

I’ve seen the 1.1b stuff floating around, and never really got around to dumping it, as most of the MS-DOS contents align with the 1.3 version, although the Windows is 2.x while 1.3 is 3.0 and the 4th volume of the OS/2 Reference update for OS/2 1.2 had not been written yet.

All over that 🙂 I was hoping this might support hyperlinks

I think these ones are too old. I’ve been using the TSR extracted text files instead, not perfect, but ASCII is better than trying to read through the drinking straw that is MS-DOS.

I also dumped the BookShelf stuff on Archvie.org as ASCII… 🙂

Hi Phillip

I had a go with the Advisor Extractor against the Microsoft Programmers library (https://archive.org/details/MicrosoftProgramersLibraryV1.3).

$ java -cp ./advisor-extractor-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.jar uk.me.philipsearle.advisor.HtmlTopicExtractor ./MSLIB/C.HLP ./test/

But no luck:

Exception in thread “main” uk.me.philipsearle.advisor.BadAdvisorFileException: Incorrect magic number: 480, expected 20044
at uk.me.philipsearle.advisor.AdvisorDocumentLoader.parseHeader(AdvisorDocumentLoader.java:94)
at uk.me.philipsearle.advisor.AdvisorDocumentLoader.loadDocument(AdvisorDocumentLoader.java:75)
at uk.me.philipsearle.advisor.HtmlTopicExtractor.main(HtmlTopicExtractor.java:25)

I’m not sure they’re the files it is supposed to work with or not, or whether it’s just the “Quick Help” files.

Okay, email sent.

Hope this helps!