Memoirs of a Novelty Account

I few years ago I went through my stash of (legal) PC software (games), seeing what would still run. Stuff which ran on DOS was basically no problem, and I'm sure a bit of fiddling with DOSBox would handle any exceptions. Anything which needed Windows 3.1 was a write-off, mostly because of stuff like Win-G and obsolete video codecs. Windows 9x software had a better chance of working, although some still had "wrong version" install issues.

It can be difficult to run older DOS software if you don't have a 5 1/4 inch drive. Luckily the Apex has 2... But no hard disk.

I just pretend that switching disks is fun, but in reality it's annoying as heck.

Yeah. Before I junked my last 5 1/4 equipped tower PC I went through my stash of floppies and copied them to an external hard drive.

 

Butt that was easy in comparison to recovering the files from a proprietary format backup CD. In that case I lucked out 'cause I still had the original software, the parallel port CD burner, and an old laptop which could support both.

 

I also managed to do some backups using a laplink null-modem cable with a PC to PC copy program.

CD-ROM's, man. Even modern imaging software has trouble making a working copy of 1999's SC3K.

Null-modem? You mean like AppleTalk? I wish computers could still connect like that...

Null-modem - a serial cable with the transmit & receive wires crossed. I think I used this: http://www.pcxt-micro.com/dos-interlink.html