copper20 Posted February 10, 2015 Share Posted February 10, 2015 I'm considering buying some dos games, but first I need a floppy drive for my fancy Windows 8.1. If I try an internal floppy drive, it won't fit. So that limits me to an external which is 15 dollars. Will an external floppy drive work on modern computers that run Windows 8.1? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Omega-TI Posted February 10, 2015 Share Posted February 10, 2015 Yes! That question interested me, so I just plugged in my USB floppy to my Window 8.1 Stream 7 Tablet and it worked just fine. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
copper20 Posted February 10, 2015 Author Share Posted February 10, 2015 Good to know. What about an internal 3.5 inch floppy drive? My computer's cd drive is covered by a door, and there is an expansion bay with a door as well. I'm aware that I will likely need a bracket or something to mount a floppy drive in, but is it worth the trouble? I would rather ask before trying anything. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Crimefighter Posted February 10, 2015 Share Posted February 10, 2015 You're best going USB here - a lot of PCs eliminated the floppy drive bay and those that do have one don't have the connector to plug an internal one in. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rybags Posted February 10, 2015 Share Posted February 10, 2015 A USB floppy drive won't be of much use if you want to run Dos or much earlier Windows versions natively, ie not under virtual or emulation environments like DosBox, VirtualPC, WMWare etc. But, in many cases the older games will run way too fast on modern hardware so it's often better to run in a sandboxed environment or just use an old machine like a Pentium 200MMX or similar. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
copper20 Posted February 10, 2015 Author Share Posted February 10, 2015 I would be using Dosbox to play old dos games by the way. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alex_79 Posted February 12, 2015 Share Posted February 12, 2015 Dosbox can use floppy images, so you only need the drive if you want to create such images from the original floppies. Else, you can do that using another (older) computer, or you can try to find the images online (which is fine if you own the original game).Moreover there's the concrete possibility that the original disks are damaged after so many years. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fujidude Posted February 21, 2015 Share Posted February 21, 2015 Yep a lot of newer motherboards have dropped floppy drive interfaces. For emaulation, disk images are THE way to go anyway. I recommend EMT4WIN to create images of real floppies under Windows. It's free and works good. I used it for that purpose myself. Under Linux, you can use DD to do the job. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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