I've setup my MS-DOS machine...but now I need to install retro games and programs to it. What's your preferred method of getting games/files to your machine? I'm open to any and all techniques. :ms_dos:
@retronianne: If it has a PATA interface, which was pretty common for most 386 systems and at one point nearly universal, you can get a cheap USB/PATA interface and write to its hard disk from, say, a GNU/Linux machine.
Failing that, a serial link between the PC system and another computer would certainly work, albeit slowly; with some hardware assembly, you can get a significantly faster parallel link to work, or if the device has an ISA bus, you can probably even get a genuine NE2000 Ethernet adapter for it. (Beware that old-school Ethernet used coaxial cables, so you might need to get a special bridge that can transfer packets between a 10Mb/s coaxial link and a 100Mb/s or gigabit modern Ethernet. But the fun thing is, 10Mb/s is such a slow speed (and it's not like NE2000 can fill it, either) that you can have plenty of fun implementing the bridge on your own using something like Raspberry Pi Pico or ESP32. (AVR8 would probably be a little bit too slow, but I'd enjoy being proven wrong on that.)
If you can get IP up and running, there's a suite of NCSA network tools out there, including NCSA telnet client and NCSA ftp client, that run on DOS. They talk to the network card using something called a "packet driver".
@retronianne for my machine i'm using a compact flash card, and so i'd just pull it out and put the games on that way via an adapter on a modern machine :-)
@retronianne: A fun ... potentially ... thing to know is that IDE CD drives used to be a thing, too. You can probably still get some, and you can probably get DOS to be able to read stuff from a CD via one.
The thing that might make it problematic is, while the IDE end was pretty stable for some twenty years or so, the shiny data disc end kept getting tweaked in tiny ways that would often need firmware update in the drive to be usable, and the old firmwares might be hard to find. If your luck is particularly bad, you might even end up finding a CD drive that fails reading plain old CDR discs, and only accepts factory-pressed CDs.
@retronianne what's nice is that with the right adapter my pentium 1 system just sees it as another IDE drive, it's an easy solution with good performance too :-) i have several different OSs on different cards, easy to just swap them out
@eri: That's because CF is basically defined as IDE, just through a slightly smaller connector. But the protocol is exactly the same. I think there might have been an extra option for lower signalling voltage, but I'm not sure about that without checking.
@eri@retronianne yeah! CF cards are an easy way to do this, and a fun side-benefit is that you can do it two-ways: When you pull out your card to add a new game, backup all the files on it. Then your savegames and config and stuff get saved to your main PC.
@eri@retronianne Another benefit I like with using CF cards: It's real easy to have a couple of them and swap them around as needed. Like, I've got my 386 currently set up with Freedos, but if I need to try DOS 6.22 or Windows 3.x/9x, I can just get another card and install onto there. Easy to swap 'em around when you need to switch "personalites"
@foone@eri I think you've both convinced me to go CF in the future. I'm gonna have to go with a dual boot 98SE/6.22 setup for now, but I really like the idea of having everything on a CF card and ready to go. :)
@retronianne@eri nah. I haven't had any issues with different brands, other than a few DOA no name brand ones that had already been heavily used.
2gb is fine, yeah. Bigger may not even be supported.
@foone@retronianne@eri I don't see the original post but I think that larger CF cards will work if you partition it down, since it's not a physical disk the computer just believes whatever size you say the disk is
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