Installing '94 multi-floppy KnP games with no floppy drive

Ben's picture

Hello all!

I'm Ben and I'm a freelance designer. I've mostly worked for Dan Marshall's Size Five Games, specifically on Ben There, Dan That! and Time Gentlemen, Please!

As Dan and I have mentioned in a few interviews, we started designing games as teenagers on KnP and GF. People have shown interest in seeing these old, terrible games of ours, so I dug out the floppies. One of them was a one-disk game and easy to sort out (free download here: http://www.sizefivegames.com/forum/index.php?topic=4182.0). Unfortunately, most of them are multi-disk games and for various reasons I am now stuck with copies of each disk on my laptop hard-drive but no floppy disk drive. I'm running Windows 7 64-bit without the option to run XP mode.

I've managed to turn the contents of each disk into .iso image files. As far as I can tell, I need to:

1) create a virtual floppy drive
2) run Win 3.1 in DOSbox and use the vfd software to start the install process on the first disk image then swap between the disk images as the install program demands
3) once the game is installed, either play the game straight away or install KnP and then play the game through that.

After spending an afternoon fighting with Virtual Floppy Drive, I've given up on it. A couple of guys from different forums, noyb and RobF (don't know if they're called the same here) recommended I try these forums. RobF also linked me to a guide here on getting 3.1 running through DOSbox.

Does this sound the correct way to go about it? Anyone able to recommend another bit of freeware or option for creating a vfd rather than VFD? Not having a floppy drive OR the correct version of Windows seems to be a hurdle too far to get this to happen.

Thanks!

snapman's picture

Welcome!

If the filenames on the disks don't overlap, you should be able to drop all the contents in one folder, mount that, and run the installer from there.

SpindleyQ's picture

Hey Ben! You've definitely

Hey Ben! You've definitely come to the right place; I'm always happy to preserve Klik & Play games for posterity.

If snapman's suggestion doesn't work, you should be able to do the job entirely within DOSBox. (Assuming you have Win3.1 installed already.)

Start DOSBox and run this command:
Z:\> IMGMOUNT A C:\Images\MyImage1.iso C:\Images\MyImage2.iso -t iso
where "C:\Images\MyImageX.iso" is the path to your ISO images, in order, on your actual drive.

Then, when installing and you need to switch to the next floppy to continue the installation, simply hit ctrl-f4.

If you still have trouble with that, feel free to post the ISOs as an attachment, or shoot me a private message, and I'd be happy to have a look at extracting the game(s) for you.

SpindleyQ's picture

Also, my preferred method

Also, my preferred method for running KNP games on 64-bit machines (not mentioned in the FAQ for some reason) is to install any 32-bit version of Windows (like XP, if you've got a copy kicking around) into VirtualBox. That might be easier than finding a copy of Win3.1 and installing it into DOSBox.

Ben's picture

Thanks!

Thanks for the responses, guys (and sorry if this comment shows up in the wrong place, I haven't got used to these forums' set-up yet)!

I'll take a look at the suggestions, but even scanning through them made my head hurt so it might save me hours of pain to see if Dan's okay with me taking SpindleyQ up on his kind offers...

Ben's picture

Update

Hey all,

Dan's got to play it on the safe side legal-wise these days, so we can't take you up on your very kind offers, SpindleyQ, but I'll probably be back with more questions and tears soon!

Thanks for the advice!

FlaviusMaximus's picture

Looks like SpindleyQ's going

Looks like SpindleyQ's going to have some fun getting rid of these spams. cheers!

pensive-mosquitoes