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I wonder if the floppies still work.



I have to admit, that I was surprised when they all came back good! We already had the SDK on 3 1/2" disks, so we could compare the contents. Oddly enough all the executables, libraries and headders are a match but the helpfiles have a different CRC, despite being the same timestamp, and size.

I've installed it on 86box, and then converted the boot disk from 5 1/2" to 3 1/2" inch so I could install it on VMware and my IBM PS/2 model 80. That's another surprise I thought for sure the PS/2 drivers would be missing from the 5 1/4" disk version, but they were there!

On VMware the AT version of the PS/2 mouse driver locks the system up, but I copied the one from 6.123 and it works fine. Although there is no MS-DOS sessions working.

Also as a follow up on my 'dont waste money on a math co-processor' if you have the 'passthrough math' on 86box the dos sessions misbehave big time. Using the softfloat option for more accuate floats results in working MS-DOS. - Turns out OS/2 betas really did rely on a FPU!


You'd be surprised! Cleared my childhood house recently and got a box of floppies. Only 3 out of about a hundred were unreadeable! Had much worse results with my old CDs. Go figure...


If they've been stored correctly they should do. The things that kill floppies are magnets (obviously) and damp/mold.


Even when floppies were the primary removable storage, they'd randomly go bad.




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