Backing Up Your Old Game Floppies - Disk Images?

[gildedgirth]

This site has made me go through the depths of my garage, storage boxes etc to re-discover all my old games. I'd even forgotten how many old games I had and even forgot evening owning some of them. Just right now I opened another old box and said "whoa...there's Rise of the Dragon and Magic Candle".

Anyway, surprisingly as I go through my old floppies I'm finding they work but anyone recommend a good way to archive them? Seems like keeping the floppies as disk images and mounting is the best solution but dunno if I feel like paying $30 to buy winimage for something I'd use rarely. Aside from winimage, anyone know of an alternative solution? I tried out a couple freeware apps but I didn't find the ideal solution. The only freeware mounting app I found couldn't create images and wouldn't mount images made with another freeware app that did create images.

I tried rawwritewin but that only allowed me to manipulate from pre-existing disk images. Virtual Floppy Driver only mounted images, and can't create images. Another freeware app created images but Virtual Floppy Driver couldn't mount them.

What's everyone else doing with thier old games?

[Reup]

How about using Floppy Image (freeware) (http://www.woundedmoon.org/win32/floppyimage.html). You can mount them directly in DosBOX using imgmount (http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php?page=Internal+Programs%2FImgMount)

I don't know if Daemon tools will let you mount a floppy-image... ??

[Caged]

amazing...although not surprising. Floppies used to be highly reliable but now they have become cheap pieces of crap. Its well known now that floppies can go bad in a matter of days. Get those pieces of gold backed up soon man and hope you have fun with them :thumbs:

[gildedgirth]

Thanks. I'll try mounting with dosbox. I wasn't aware it could mount floppy images.

Yeah, I should spend a weekend backing up all my old games, although I wonder if I'll encounter any copy-protected floppy games. I can't recall if I had any, but I do remember software companies trying funky things to prevent people from copy floppies but maybe that won't happen if I'm just making disk images.

I wonder if my Apple IIe games still work as well. Now those were flimsy things, but I still have got the boxes, games and computer with the lovely green monitor in the garage. Sadly though some of my favorite games, like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and other infocom games don't have all those nice extra's like the "Don't Panic" button. I wonder what those would go for on ebay now...although I do think I've got some of the original Ultima's with the cloth maps lying around somewhere....

[Ferna182]

floppy disks are a peace of crap nowdays hahahahahah my uncle has a lot of 5 1/4 floppy disks and most of them still works! hahahahah

[GraveDigger]

Go for HD-Copy!

When I got my first CDROM (1x JVC) back in 1992 I created images of all my floppies (7800+) with this utility and saved them on 17 CDs. :D

This is what we call "Progress" - 7808 Floppies = 17 CDs

[Ferna182]

you mean... when you got your first CDR-rom