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Weird title, I know... But this is a weird subject.

 

I have a Win7 Enterprise machine, 64 bit. It has (believe it or not) a beautiful, internal floppy drive (3.5") that works flawlessly.

 

I want to play games with it... Like the old days. I have a problem, however, as Carmen Sandiego and the like will not run in Win7(64).

 

I know... I can download emulators or play in DOSBox. But then my 3.5" drive is useless.

 

Is there any way to get old school legit with my flippy floppy, or am I just wishing in one hand, so to speak?

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Go on Ebay and buy an old ThinkPad or something. They're built like tanks and are usually in like-new condition as long as they're complete (it's pretty obvious if they're not; many have been cannibalized for hard drives, batteries, power supplies or other parts). Best part is you can get them for literally like 20 bucks. You can't even buy a copy of Windows 98 by itself for that. While you're at it, buy something like a 40GB 2.5" drive there for like $8 - the one bad thing about old ThinkPads is that their drives are annoyingly whiny.

 

I have a ThinkPad 600X that I bought at a thrift store for $20. I use it for old CD games I have that require a 32 bit OS. Mine doesn't have a floppy drive (though it has an Ultrabay, so I could give it one for like $10), but you can easily find ThinkPads that come with one.

 

There is no real way I know of to run 32 bit software on a 64 bit OS without using emulation. If you want the real experience, you're going to either need to dual boot, or you're going to need a second machine. A 32 bit copy of any version of Windows is probably going to cost more than the $30 or so it would be for a fully usable second machine capable of running old software, though. And laptops don't take up a lot of space.

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It is not even given that MS-DOS 6.22 or whatever would run as intended on your machine. I suppose it is old enough to have a BIOS, otherwise you might be stuck with a more newer 3rd party DOS. Also consider that many DOS games were timed towards the CPU so they'd run much too fast even on a Pentium 133, much less whatever power house you have in that Enterprise machine.

 

You seem to have found emulation, which probably is your best bet.

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For disclosure, my floppy drive is A:\

 

Commands, in order:

 

mount c a:\oregon

c:

dir

oregon

 

Then spinnies and whirs... The dir command shows me the file contents in the Oregon folder, as they should appear. OREGON is the exe that runs the game.

 

I have a clone file in my C:\DOSGAMES folder that works just fine.

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Why do you mount the floppy drive as C:/ ?

 

I think that DOSBOX try to access your drive as a hard drive and is confused because it isn't.

Mount A:/ as A:/ and see if it goes better.

 

I acessed floppies and CD on DosBox so I'm sure it works fine if you mount them as the standard A, B and D.

Edited by CatPix
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