Another post to simply create a mind dump in case I ever need to / want to do this again!

I recently found myself restoring an old CompuAdd 810 (XT Clone). I was able to get it up and running and also at in an XT-IDE card running the latest Universal Firmware. Long story short, I needed to run the Firmware Configuration tool and make sure that I set the device type to Rev 1 (Compatbility Mode) in order for things work.

So now I've got a working XT Clone with a Hard Drive and DOS 6.22 installed. What to do next? Of course I can't play DOOM or Wolfenstein but there are some other nostalgic games that this machine can run such as Tetris, Pac-Man, Digger, Prince of Persia, just to name a few.

The tough part is getting them from my Mac to the PC. A lot of the utilities and OS's come as ready to write disk images, while the games are unfortunately just a bunch of files in a folder ususally.

So I needed a quick and easy way to create Floppy Disk images on a Mac!

First things first, we'll need mtools so open up terminal and install using brew!

brew install mtools

Next you'll want to create an empty disk image using dd where gameimage.img is the name of the image file you want to creat and count is the disk image size. Here we are creating a disk image named gameimage.img that is made for a 1.44MB floopy!

dd if=/dev/zero of=gameimage.img bs=1024 count=1440

Next step is to format the disk image using mformat

mformat -i gameimage.img ::

Now with the disk image ready we can copy the files that we want to include in the image using mcopy where gameimage.img is the image you created and /gamefolder is the location of the folder that contains the files you want to add to the image

mcopy -i gameimage.img /gamefolder/* ::/

Finally you can confirm that the files are there by using mdir

mdir -i gameimage.img ::

This will show you a directory listing with all the files that are in the image. The final step is to write the image using Greaseweazle!

gw write gameimage.img --drive 1 --format ibm.1440

That's it, you should now have a disk with the contents of the image file you created! As always these brain dumps are more or less for myself so I have a way to reference information for things that I may only do once in a blue moon so my brain seems to forget!! Hope this helps someone!