On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 13:57:59 -0500, wrote:
snipped
My archives consist of saving the hard drives from all
the old pc's ... doubt I could retrieve much from them
now, even if I wanted to ..
John T.


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Why not? You can connect them to a windows machine and it will read
FAT just fine.
That depends. If it is an old RLL or MFM drive he might have a LOT of
trouble finding an interface card that would fit a new machine and
match the drive - and then to find one with driver support??? Even
harder yet would be an older ESDI drive.

You could also load it as C: and get a blast from the
past. W/3.1 is sweet on a P4. Your games might run a little too fast
to be useful tho.
I loaded my old A-10 Warthog game and found it was impossible to even
take the plane off without crashing.

DOSBOX is an option tho since you can slow down the apparent CPU
speed.
I still run dBaseIV in DOSBOX and it really screams. The extended
memory driver loads and it sees a huge virtual drive. I keep all of
this on a thumb drive that I mount in DOSBOX as C: and it is like I am
back in the 90s. Even the tiniest thumb drive or SD card is
unbelievably huge for a DOS w/3.1 environment.
I also took a little leftover space on one of my hard drives (100 meg
or so) and partitioned it as FAT so DOS will see it. I haven't done it
yet but one of these days I am going to "SYS" a DOS 6.3 boot loader on
it. I just do not have a diskette drive on this machine to get that
going.