[vcf-midatlantic] Project of the day - Windows 3.11 386Enh on a floppy

[Richard Cini]

Yeah, I thought of that too. I did this within Parallels on my Mac (so, going back and forth between Windows XP and MS-DOS 6.22 running as virtual machines) and Parallels doesn't support DMF (or anything other than 1.44MB). Neither does VirtualBox interestingly. It might be possible to do it on a real PC, but not sure.

Yes, that extra 200k would make a huge difference in what could be included. Another way, that I haven't dried, is using Doublespace to create a virtual drive on the floppy.

Rich
 
--
Rich Cini
http://www.classiccmp.org/cini
http://www.classiccmp.org/altair32
 

On 9/5/20, 7:23 PM, "vcf-midatlantic on behalf of John Heritage via vcf-midatlantic" <vcf-midatlantic-bounces at lists.vcfed.org on behalf of vcf-midatlantic at lists.vcfed.org> wrote:

    How about using one of the extended disk formats - 1.68MB or whatever
    format IBM Used for their OS/2 floppies?   or is that not bootable?   (This
    format was at least readable by standard 1.44 MB drives using standard
    1.44MB disks.. )
    
    Interesting challenge !
    
    On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 7:20 PM Richard Cini via vcf-midatlantic <
    vcf-midatlantic at lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
    
    > Not really sure what applicability this really has, but today’s challenge
    > was to get Windows 3.11 Enhanced Mode running from a single 1.44MB floppy
    > disk. There are easy ways to get Standard mode running, including using
    > files from “precopy.cab” on Windows 95 or 98, but this was way more
    > challenging. I started from a full install and pared it down using a guide
    > I found (which was a two-disk solution).
    >
    >
    >
    > The boot files and required extras (HIMEM, PKUNZIP and a very small
    > ramdrive driver) took about 300K, leaving only about 1.2MB (1.156MB to be
    > exact) for a complete install. A normal no-frills install is about 3-ish
    > megabytes.
    >
    >
    >
    > There are significant compromises – no virtual memory, no networking, no
    > multimedia, only system fonts, and only a few apps, but once running you
    > could run them from another floppy. I discovered that 386Enh won’t put a
    > temporary swapfile on a RAM drive, so it runs without it.
    >
    >
    >
    > I guess you could call this the 1992 version of PortableApps :-)
    >
    >
    >
    > Rich
    >
    >
    >
    > --
    >
    > Rich Cini
    >
    > http://www.classiccmp.org/cini
    >
    > http://www.classiccmp.org/altair32
    >
    >
    >
    >
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    >