PC Emulation

[Angus]

Hi,

I've been looking at emulation a bit recently, and as well as putting together a Shapeshifter/Fusion partition for Mac stuff, I want to try something similar with PCX/PC Task for the (stinking) pc.

I know what you're thinking......   :-)

Its going to be slow. Anyway, I want to try getting some really old games running, that hopefully won't be too worried about the speed of the emulation.

I gather I need a file called MSDOS.something or other. Is that something I can get from a modern pc, or possibly a Windows '98 startup floppy?

Thanks for any advice.

[Angus]

I have a pc in the house, and I keep a 98 system floppy with that for making partitions and using ghost.exe. Would that floppy have the necessary files on it?

If it does I guess I could e-mail them to the Amiga, or would I need to format a 720k floppy for the Amiga using crossdos, and install them that way?

I'm obviously a bit confused about this.

[Angus]

So gents,
I'm confused - when they say that PC-Task or PCX needs MSDOS or equivalent to run, is that basically the contents of a 98 system floppy?

I have one of these and the listing is below - thanks for any further advice.

ATTRIB.EXE    15252 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
CD1.SYS       34262 26-Sep-96  5:13:04p ----rw-d
CD2.SYS       16504 21-Nov-96  1:54:00a ----rw-d
CD3.SYS       19984 13-Aug-96  1:03:02a ----rw-d
CD4.SYS       41302 11-May-98  8:01:00p ----rw-d
CHKDSK.EXE    28096 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
DELTREE.EXE   19083 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
DISPLAY.SYS   17175 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
EDIT.COM      69902 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
EDIT.HLP      10790 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
EXTRACT.EXE   93242 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
FDISK.EXE     63916 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
FIND.EXE       6658 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
FORMAT.COM    49575 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
HIMEM.SYS     33191 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
IEXTRACT.EXE  17655 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
LABEL.EXE      9324 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
MEM.EXE       32146 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
MOVE.EXE      27299 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
MSCDEX.EXE    25473 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
SCANDISK.EXE 143818 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
SCANDISK.INI   7329 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
SCANREG.EXE  165502 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
SMARTDRV.EXE  45379 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
SYS.COM       18967 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
XCOPY.EXE      3878 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
XCOPY32.EXE    3878 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
XCOPY32.MOD   41472 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d

[Angus]

I wrote that manual on Aminet (see docs/help/PC-Task_Guide.lha) and I wrote a FAQ.

PC Task and PCx work ideally with MS DOS or DR DOS (which is downloadable), although you need a 1.44MB floppy drive, although 720K drive will work it requires more fiddling to install DOS.
----------------------------------------------------------


I saw your document, but I had to edit the start of the amigaguide file for it to open on my system (OS3.9) It said something about "Not enough data".

I couldn't find much about actually getting things set-up, but that may be me being dozy.

I have copied most of MSDOS 6 on to a 720k floppy, but PC-Task complains that the floppy is not bootable.

Any advice?  

[Angus]

I may have not understood.

I rebooted the pc with the MSDOS 6.2 floppy inserted.

I pushed F7.

It made a some beeps.

Nothing else.

If I held F7 down continuously it "broke the startup-sequence" and said something about inserting the disk with the batch file. :-/

Have I misunderstood?

Thanks for your help.

[Angus]

I don't know what's going wrong then.  

If I let the MSDOS6.2 disk boot up (after restarting the pc) I just end up with a DOS prompt. There are no requesters, and the F keys don't do anything. There is some text about 2 devices being called Banana unit 1 and Banana Unit 2 which I have seen before on other boot disks.

I tried typing

"Format A:/S"

But the DOS message was

"Formatting 1.44M floppy"

then it failed on my 720K disk.

I am wondering if the pc supports the 720K format.

I got the MSDOS 6.2 disk image from here:

http://www.bootdisk.com/

[Angus]

but first try again using now this command:

format a: /F:720 /s

this should work

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And you are absolutely correct - it worked a treat.

Thank you very much. I will try and make a safe note of this useful info.

P.S.
Did you get my message?