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TerminX

Looking for / Want to buy: Registered Doom Mail Order (Approx Values, offers, etc)

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Demonicus666 said:

Was there any share ware released on 5.25 floppy disks ? Also isn't that 1.9 doom cd a fake in the omega link ?

Yes, I have Shareware Doom on 360k floppies from Software Labs - a long since defunct shareware distributor.


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I have a Doom v1.1 CD (with a neat little jewel-case sized manual) which is generally considered to be a bootleg. Some Doom order forms had a CD option, so omega_supreme's copy might be genuine but very rare.


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Also any other doom games on 5.25 or 3.5 disks ?? Besides of course doom , ultimate doom , and doom ii .

None that I know of. Final Doom appears to have been a CD-only release and Master Levels would need a carton of floppies.

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I wonder If contacting I'd to realease doom registered on 5,25 floppy disk and cd is possible ?? Like with the mail order option back in 1993

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I don't see it happening, CD is do-able but would there be any demand beyond a handful of collectors? As for the floppies, good luck finding a functioning 5.25" disk duplicator and a source of half-decent disks.

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GreyGhost said:

I don't see it happening, CD is do-able but would there be any demand beyond a handful of collectors? As for the floppies, good luck finding a functioning 5.25" disk duplicator and a source of half-decent disks.


I have a 5.25 can you find it on ebay? If you cant then maybe I'll sell mine?

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Demonicus666 said:

I wonder If contacting I'd to realease doom registered on 5,25 floppy disk and cd is possible ?? Like with the mail order option back in 1993

Haha, no.

They certainly don't have the ability to make 3.5" copies any more and I doubt 5.25" floppy disks are even still manufactured.

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fraggle said:

Haha, no.

They certainly don't have the ability to make 3.5" copies any more and I doubt 5.25" floppy disks are even still manufactured.


I think that went over your head. Didn't you see the 5.25 they have here in the post? How are they going to copy or use them without a 5.25 ?
i really am curious how this is gonna work if they don't have one? :P
Thats why I asked- if they are not common- I will sell mine if not
they can buy from another on ebay.

**I have just searched and there are many for sale. They DO fit in a standard PC tower too.
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.TR3.TRC0.A0.X5.25+floppy+drive&_nkw=5.25+floppy+drive&_sacat=0&_from=R40

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While the drives are still available they're predominantly second-hand and many would have seen better days. A lot of them are double density (360k) drives, which aren't suitable for duplicating the Registered Doom disks (1.2M) and there are others which weren't even intended for use with PCs. As for locating a purpose-build duplicator, they'd be almost as rare as rocking horse manure.

Then there's the small matter of 5.25" drives no longer being supported at the OS and/or BIOS level, at present the "easiest" way for me to read 5.25" disks on my desktop is to use my Kryoflux card to create disk images and open those in DOSBox.

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GreyGhost said:

Then there's the small matter of 5.25" drives no longer being supported at the OS and/or BIOS level, at present the "easiest" way for me to read 5.25" disks on my desktop is to use my Kryoflux card to create disk images and open those in DOSBox.


It is true that 1.2 MB 5.25" drives and floppies are very rare -I actually never saw one, all 5.25"s I saw were 360 KB) but they are still supported in mobos that have a floppy connector and a traditional BIOS (not EFI): the tradutional BIOSes still let you switch between the 5 main floppy PC formats (these include 5.25" 360K and 1.2M, and 3.5" 720K, 1.44M and 2.88M), and you can even do stuff like "convince" the BIOS to format & read 3.5" floppies as 5.25" 360K ;-)

This is all possible because of the floppy controller's design -it doesn't really "know" what shape or form the floppies are, all it knows is how to seek a particular sector, head and track on a floppy's surface, even then you can break the rules a bit. There's functionally very little difference between 3.5", 5.25" and even more exotic formats like 8" and 3" drives.

The only real problem is finding a floppy cable with an edge connector, like the ones used by those old drives.


Doomkid92 said:

Damn, Doom is old enough to have come on 5.25s? Holy crap, never knew that. I thought the oldest versions were those ones distributed on 4 3.5 floppys.. I'd love to see that running on an ancient PC.


Once installed -mandatorily- on a hard disk, the distribution media it came on would make no difference whatsoever :-) It could very well be an early Pentium/66 in 1993 with a 1.2MB 5.25" drive and 8MB of RAM (which would be well above the minimum requirement).

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Eh, I could live without 5.25" floppies. Never really liked the look of them, or the size.

Thinking of Doom on 5.25"s is kind of weird. Those must be REALLY rare. Never seen a 3.25" release besides shareware... :I

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The Doomist said:

Never seen a 3.25" release besides shareware...


Neither have I. All I have is a set of 3.5" v1.1 floppies ;-)

Jokes apart, the 5.25" floppies were quite anachronistic even in the 80s: they were basically a scaled-down version of the large 8" ones from the early 70s, in an era when the best home computers like the Amiga, the Atari ST, the Apple Macintosh etc. had started off with the 3.5" format and never officially adopted 5.25" in any form or capacity.

The only computers really using 5.25" on a regular basis through the 80s and part of the 90s were IBM Pee Cees and compatibles, and then again only because of their obscure CP/M legacy and use as "office machines", where there already was an installed base of exotic machines with 5.25" floppies. A home computer designed from scratch on the other hand had no reason not to embrace the more robust, practical (and higher capacity) 3.5" ones.

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Maes said:

the tradutional BIOSes still let you switch between the 5 main floppy PC formats (these include 5.25" 360K and 1.2M, and 3.5" 720K, 1.44M and 2.88M), and you can even do stuff like "convince" the BIOS to format & read 3.5" floppies as 5.25" 360K ;-)

I'm pretty sure my desktop's BIOS doesn't support 2.88M (not that I've ever seen such a drive) but that one of the things I'll check once I've found a spare 360k or 1.2M boot disk to test my drive with.

The only real problem is finding a floppy cable with an edge connector, like the ones used by those old drives.

No problem, I have the proper crimping pliers and some connectors. All I need to do is avoid running out of ribbon cable. ;-)

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Maes said:

Jokes apart, the 5.25" floppies were quite anachronistic even in the 80s: they were basically a scaled-down version of the large 8" ones from the early 70s, in an era when the best home computers like the Amiga, the Atari ST, the Apple Macintosh etc. had started off with the 3.5" format and never officially adopted 5.25" in any form or capacity.

Mac started out with 3.5", but the various and ubiquitous incarnations of the Apple II were ALL about them 5.25" drives. Most computers had two and you'd be asked to swap them constantly.

The various robotic-like sounds those drives made is serious nostalgia.

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Lumping the Apple II with the Amiga and Atari ST though is a long shot -the Apple II was closer to (and competing against) the various exotic CP/M machines (such as the Osborne, Tatung Einstein etc.) in purpose and target market, and also clearly belonged to the past decade -despite Apple keeping it alive and upgrading it for a surprising 16 years (1977-1993), something it didn't do for ANY of its other computer lines, not even the 68k based ones. It even surpassed the C64 in terms of official market presence.

Yeah, the Apple II kept using 5.25" simply because its target user group did, but if we're talking about Macintoshes, those were 3.5" right off the bat.

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Don't forget also the C64 and C128 used 5.25" drives. And of course in the early 80's, quite a lot of folks made do with just cassettes. I wonder how many of those it would take to hold the shareware DOOM. ;-)

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The C64 never took its floppy format seriously: the drive itself had just as much processing power as the computer itself (yes, the 1541 drive contained a full-fledged 6502!) while its competitors used a standard PC-like controller (in particlar the Amstrad CPC), which as it turned out could control both 5.25" and 3.5" drives with little difficulty. Now why Amstrad chose the 3" "compact floppy" format instead of 3.5" is another matter...

The C64's floppies were also abysmal in performance: they loaded so slowly that even tapes saved with TurboTape (TM) could rival their "speed". Amstrad CPC OTOH loaded lightning fast from floppy, even without using a DMA channel (not even IRQ! Just busy waiting and PIO).

As for cassettes...if saved with TurboTape or a similar routine you could load about 40K or so in less than 1 minute (N.B.: normal C64 disks couldn't really do much better than that!), so Doom would probably take two C60 cassettes with that data density. Of course that means a 2-hour installation, if there are no read errors ;-)

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I have a pair of 5.25 drives, cables and disks, that I saved from old machines just in case some customer needed to get at some old data.
I believe they work with the Linux 2.4 I still currently run, those drives were on my previous Linux 2.2 machine.
I am pretty sure that I have the floppy cable with the twist.
A floppy controller that the cable will plug into is a bigger problem, as that card was ISA bus. I only have one ISA bus machine left in the old CPU pile.
I Don't know how many boxes of 5.25 blank media I have in storage.

Not much point in copying any disks unless the user has the proper drives already.

FreeDos could probably access them. I would not bother with any old DOS unless you have an equally old CPU to put it on.
Have not tried them with DosBox or Dosemu.

I think I trashed the CP/M high density floppy drives because could only find one box of special media that worked with them and they never worked well, and my old hardware box overflowed.
I even have an old tape drive from the same era.
Also have an Apple II+ and Apple IIe with 5.25 drives. I think that Apple II+ cost me around $5000, and the IIe cost about $50 at a mall gathering.

Mpls/St.Paul, MN, USA

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I've used 5.25" drives with Windows XP and ubuntu 11+, and in both cases they worked. If you are unsure, try setting the BIOS to 5.25", 360 KB with the 3.5" drive still plugged in and try force-formatting some 3.5" floppies into a bastardized '5.25" on 3.5"' format (BTW, that's how you can transfer new Amstrad CPC software directly from your PC to your old CPC, if you connect a 3.5" drive to it).

In some cases however, it's best not to set the BIOS setting to 360 KB: some Windows XP installations choke on it, even with a 5.25" drive attached. Leave it as 3.5", 1.44MB and use a special utility to read/write 360 KB images, instead, rather than Windows' file explorer.

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The last time i tried, i believe my 1.2mb drives workes find in xp, connected together with a 1.44mb.. i recall only getting a 360k drive working when uses alone. also, when trying to write disks in emulator for systems such as a coco or c64, the disks wouldnt read, but they would write. i think that only some bios on systems that can run xp, even have the option.. i have a ton of old 5.25 floppies, would be kind of fun to store Doom on them, i only have Doom 2 on original 3.5 disks..

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GreyGhost said:

Master Levels would need a carton of floppies.


Actually, I think the 20 WAD files which actually make up the "Master Levels" can fit on a single floppy. The Maximum Doom shovelware OTOH...

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Slightly off-topic, but I've heard the Hacx CD and disks are extremely rare as well.

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Hello, I'm new to these forums but not new to Doom. So last week I acquired this:




I got it for $66.00 total. It didn't come with a manual. :(



The box is in pretty rough shape too. I'm curious if any of you still have a box laying around and possibly with a manual that you lost the floppies with and that you were willing to part with.

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Stray manuals turn up sometimes on eBay, but I don't like your chances of finding a spare box.

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Looks pretty typical condition for one of those boxes. I doubt you'll find many better without paying lots and lots of money.

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sithmartyr said:

It's mainly the top of the box that makes me cringe:

That's one of the pitfalls of buying old games. At least the top flap's still there, I wasn't as lucky with my Heretic mail order box.

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