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

[John Heritage]

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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