On Sun, 16 Jul 2023, Warner Losh via cctalk wrote:
OK. I have about 500 DEC Ranibow floppy images that
I've ripped over the
years.
I also have a number of .td0 images as well as other oddballs.
Other than Lotus 123 needing to have funky sectors on one of its bigger
tracks for copy protection, I think having the raw images suffice.
I have some disks that I have multiple copies of (MS-DOS, CP/M, Winchester
Utilities, DEC Rainbow diagnostics etc).I have a few copies of some
software packages. I have a few disks that are clearly personal. And some
of the variations of MS-DOS have different patches applied by various
install programs (or debug scripts published in different trade rags of the
time). And at least one has a special driver installed that overwrites the
DEC Winchester for things like Univation).
So, what I'd like to do is to is somehow organize all this. I wrote some
software to extract files from the filesystem.So I'd like to have a
separate copy of the expanded files.
Lots of moving parts for 40-year-old floppies. I'm struggling with how to
organize all this, how to keep track of this, and how to allow others to
contribute their disk images and allow things to be studied and run. I'd
like to keep the raw images (to mine them for drivers like the univation
one I discovered). I'd like to keep the busted apart files to access them
more easily, etc.
Is there some book, website, paper, etc that I can use to to help me
organize all this so I can share it with others? Is this even the right
place to ask? There's got to be several people that have solved this issue
before....
Warner
A few thoughts, . . .
There are readily available patches to remove the copy protection from
Lotus. I would be hesitant to trust my data to a program that relied on
anything as precarious as an "uncopyable disk"
And make special labels for all such special disks, as reminders.
make copies of DOS progams, and remove the version number checking. Don't
rely on SETVER. For example, besides all of the utilities that
come with DOS, LINK.EXE and EXE2BIN have version number checking.
Label them! Version number checking was created due to disasters from
running DOS 1.00 CHKDSK on DOS 1.10 and 2.00 disks!
In most cases it is trivial; search for
MOV AH, 30h
Int 21h
and gut the conditional branch that follows.
(in some cases that is quite similar to the removal of copy protection)
Keep some of the old hardware. You might not expect that a program (such
as the drivers for the Cordata laser printer) to refuse to run on a newer
processor. I dedicated an XT for it.
Set up a cool, dry storage for the originals.
Have moderately extreme redundancy of your copies of everything.
Different media, and different locations.
Index by function, name, and chronology.
. . .
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com