Rubenerd

8-bit Commodore computers aside, my first love is still probably DOS. It was the first OS I had experience with as a kid, even before the old Apple IIs my primary school inherited. We’re spoiled for choice when it comes to virtualising it on our contemporary systems, and there’s still (mostly) a wide availability of software and drivers available.

(If I could tap into my inner Amelia Watson or Ouro Kronii, I’d travel back to the early 1990s and whisper AMIGA into my dad’s ear before he bought home our first family PC clone. But then, he specifically bought a PC because he used XTs and ATs at work, so that would likely have not made a difference. One can dream).

But in another form of what I dub the Buffet Problem, you end up downloading a ton of stuff into various folders, and it quickly becomes unwieldy. As an example, I’ll buy a EGA graphics card for an old machine, and soon my current desktop is full of archives and folders of various drivers, utilities, and versions of those drivers and utilities to try. Being from different places and times, there’s no consistency to their naming, or archive type. Even if something works, I soon forget which it was, and the whole exercise repeats.

I got around this by having an retro archive directory structure on my FreeBSD ZFS NAS that looks, a little something, like this:

• BeOS
• CPM
• DOS
  • Games
  • GEM
  • Drivers
    • Controllers
    • Iomega
    • Graphics
    • NICs
    • Sound
  • Installers
  • Utilities
  • Win16
• SD2IEC

But in reality, I was still shoving files with their original names and archive formats into these, without much regard for consistency and future use. If only there were a solution for easily accessing this stuff from the retrocomputers in question, and knowing which driver or utility was necessary to do something.

The answer came to me when I realised I was already doing things better with my curated, organised, and catalogued SD2IEC folder for my Commodore machines, and could apply the same logic to an ISO instead of an SD card.

I wrote last year about using mkisofs(1) to create discs for DOS. Provided you have an optical drive in your target machine, you could feasibly have every single driver and program on a single disc, with oodles of spare space (I cheat and add a CD-ROM to old PCs, even if it means using a sound card’s IDE port or a SCSI daughter card. It might not be period correct, but they’re too useful).

I created a new folder to act as the ISO root, then decompressed every archive, floppy disk image, and self-extracting EXE into it; quite an experience, especially for some of the more esoteric formats! A few diff(1) runs confirmed that much of what I stored were duplicates, they were just archived and named differently. This has been another great idle brain activity to do in the evenings; it must have taken a few weeks on and off at least.

Cooler still, the limitation of this approach ended up being a strength. The 8.3 filename limit forced me to rename every resulting directory. To make sense of it, I made a README.TXT on the root of the image listing clearly what each directory was, the version, and the year it was released. At a glance now I can see everything I’ve amassed, and it’s easy enough to rebake the ISO when I find something new.

For bonus points, I’m now thinking whether I create a simple DOS boot menu using CHOICE, or a pseudo-GUI tool like PowerMenu, or even dusting off some old Borland Pascal to write a quick menu script. Then I could insert the disc, pick exactly what I need, and run.

Did I mention I’m in my thirties yet? Or was that painfully obvious?