Floppy disk emulator

[AtomicFire]

I used a floppy disk emulator a while back, loved it, but deleted the program. Lets eee if anyone else remembers it and can guild me to where I can try finding it again.

Its a simple small download, with no install. Un-zip and run. I think it was written for linux, then ported to Windows with Cygwin, and then someone wrote a GUI for it.

What it does is make a floppy drive and assign it the A: drive letter. You can then write\read to it just like a floppy drive, and from the program you can dump or grab an image of whats currently on the drive.

Simple little program but I loved it. Anyone remember it?

thanks in advance
-AtomicFire

 

[RedShark]

I've used this one and it meets your criteria I think:

http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/vfd.html

"Virtual Floppy Drive 2.1

This is a virtual floppy drive for Windows NT / 2000 / XP (works also on 2003, it seems).
You can mount a floppy image file as a virtual floppy drive and directly access the contents -- view, edit, rename, delete or create files on a virtual floppy, format a virtual floppy, launch a program on a virtual floppy... almost anything you can do with a real floppy."

 

[brom42]

I've used this one and it meets your criteria I think:

http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/vfd.html

"Virtual Floppy Drive 2.1

This is a virtual floppy drive for Windows NT / 2000 / XP (works also on 2003, it seems).
You can mount a floppy image file as a virtual floppy drive and directly access the contents -- view, edit, rename, delete or create files on a virtual floppy, format a virtual floppy, launch a program on a virtual floppy... almost anything you can do with a real floppy."

I second VFD. I use it and it works great.

 

[cell_491]

I've used this one and it meets your criteria I think:

http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/vfd.html

"Virtual Floppy Drive 2.1

This is a virtual floppy drive for Windows NT / 2000 / XP (works also on 2003, it seems).
You can mount a floppy image file as a virtual floppy drive and directly access the contents -- view, edit, rename, delete or create files on a virtual floppy, format a virtual floppy, launch a program on a virtual floppy... almost anything you can do with a real floppy."

can you boot from it? if so then you should be able to flash bioses and shit which would be tight

 

[jpmkm]

can you boot from it? if so then you should be able to flash bioses and shit which would be tight

It is a windows thing. From the first line of what you quoted:

This is a virtual floppy drive for Windows NT / 2000 / XP (works also on 2003, it seems).

 

[AtomicFire]

I've used this one and it meets your criteria I think:

http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/vfd.html

"Virtual Floppy Drive 2.1

This is a virtual floppy drive for Windows NT / 2000 / XP (works also on 2003, it seems).
You can mount a floppy image file as a virtual floppy drive and directly access the contents -- view, edit, rename, delete or create files on a virtual floppy, format a virtual floppy, launch a program on a virtual floppy... almost anything you can do with a real floppy."

Thats exactly what I was looking for...thanks!

 

[Nazo]

can you boot from it? if so then you should be able to flash bioses and shit which would be tight

Maybe you can't do that, but, what you CAN do is use it to make bootable floppy images which you burn to a CDRW and boot. ^_^

Actually, I've since come up with a better way. Syslinux on a bootable flash drive with many different images for every repair I can make a bootable image for, which of course includes bios flashing.

Anyway, VFD works out pretty well for me too. There was a time there when I didn't have a working floppy at all. I finally broke down and bought one just because I needed something to make it easier to make boot disks for an ancient PC that doesn't like CDRWs and I run out of CDRs in a hurry (which it seems to also not like half of) considering the number of mistakes I make. Still, in the meantime it's saved me a few times.

 

[S1nF1xx]

I'm just curious what one would need this for? Old DOS games?

I've got a cool Apple IIGS emulator. Oregon Trail and Conan rock!

 

[Nazo]

Well, the example I gave, creating bootdisk images for bootable CDs is probably the most obvious thing you could need it for. If you don't have a floppy drive, that's the only way to do it. It's actually useless for DOS games really because you'd have to use it INSIDE windows, which means you'd be using it in DOSBox or something, and due to the way DOSBox emulates, you don't have to worry about drivers taking up half your conventional ram, so don't need any special bootdisks. The NTVDM doesn't do any real kind of bootup thing and, as such, won't care if you have a floppy or not, much less use it. Well, you could make a bootable game CD or something, but, even I'm not interested in any DOS games small enough to fit on a single floppy, not even a 2.88MB one (if you open the image in WinImage or something like that and switch it over to 2.88MB mode, you can then put other files on it and fit a bit more on the disk image. Useful for things like PartitionMagic which wants you to use two disks -- just be sure to edit out the part that pauses asking for disk two or it looks silly.)

 

[S1nF1xx]

Ahhh, nifty. Thanks.