[vcf-midatlantic] Project of the day - Windows 3.11 386Enh on a floppy
John Heritage
john.heritage at gmail.com
Sun Sep 6 11:47:11 EDT 2020
Very nice! That's stackering the Win 3.11 boot disk itself? I am curious
how much that compresses..
Also, would that work on a 'modern' PC - such as a Socket 7 system? (of ~
Pentium MMX era/vintage)? I have a K6-3+ BIOS modded Socket 7 system I
use for fun. (OC'd to 75 MHz bus = 450 MHz).
On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 8:33 PM Richard Cini <rich.cini at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ha, just pulled out a copy of Stacker 4.0 and compressed a floppy disk.
> 2.8MB free. That's a lot of room :-)
>
> Rich
>
> --
> Rich Cini
> http://www.classiccmp.org/cini
> http://www.classiccmp.org/altair32
>
>
> On 9/5/20, 7:28 PM, "Richard Cini" <rich.cini at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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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