Uncreative Labs

Joined: 19 Apr 2012 Posts: 9

Hello everyone, glad I found this cool site. I'm into 16 bit read mode 8086 programming and general tinkering and have a Laser XT 8088 with 640k. I managed to get a VGA card installed and a 720kb DD disk drive! The rest of my "classic" machines have died or had to recycle due to space limtations.

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

depending on the os you can do a lot,
anything that uses a lot of graphice is a bit beyond the machine though Flight Simulator
seems to work well.
a pc/xt will accept abd boot from a 720k floppy. by itself. but needs an os that supports that disk to format it to 720

a driver.sys statement in the boot device
allows the system to format the 720
BUT--- it tends to change to unwanted drive letters Ypou can device=driver.sys with statements.
OR look up drivparm and the same statements.
( no device= please)
the compaticard uses a similar method no bios on it
and other cards with Bios' let you use 1.2 and 1.44 floppies.
1.2 floppies are useless with out a card that has a bios chip.
But a 1.22 can be used as a 720k disk.

Joined: 19 Apr 2012 Posts: 9

Interesting you mentioned formatting a 720k disk. I had noticed that it would only format floppies to 320k! I've currently running Caledera OpenDOS "lite" 7.1 on it right now, partly because the distribution is on DD disks. Previously I had FreeDOS on it, but much of the FreeDOS utilities require 386+ and the console speed was annoyingly slow.