getting DooM shareware on 3.5"?

[resurgam]

hey all! This is my first post, but instead of making a typical intro thread first, I thought i'd just go ahead and ask a dumb question.(yay!)

Anyways, something that has been bothering me for a long time is the lack of DooM on my old 486dx Epson laptop. The only problem is it can't connect to the intarweb, and only has a floppy drive.

I have Many blank floppies laying around, and my question is this: How can I make my doom shareware fit on at least 2 or more blank 3.5" floppy diskettes? Mostly the WAD is giving me problems considering it is 4mb+ (and still large, even with compression), and a diskette can only hold 1.44, or 1.68 with that old MS hack.

Any help would be SOOO greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance

Help!

[wildweasel]

If you use a program like WinRAR, there should be an option that you can span an archive into several pieces (one of the presets divides the archive into floppy-sized chunks). Rarlab also has a DOS command-line version of the RAR extractor, which can extract any archive that WinRAR creates.

[Mindless Rambler]

You download the install files and place them on two floppies, you don't put the extracted files on floppies.

[DaniJ]

Erm, you do realize that the original DOOM shareware install fitted on a single floppy anyway :P

Just copy it over.

[CODOR]

DaniJ said:
Erm, you do realize that the original DOOM shareware install fitted on a single floppy anyway

Maybe a single 2.88MB floppy, but I've never seen one of those in real life. It ordinarily took 2 1.44MB disks; just get doom19s.zip and put deice.exe, install.bat, dooms_19.dat, and dooms_19.1 on one, and dooms_19.2 on the other.

[DaniJ]

Perhaps my memory is a bit clouded but I thought DOOM shareware did only come on a single floppy. Oh, well.

[cycloid]

1. remove HD from 486
2. attatch to newer computer with cd drive/network connection
3. copy everything over
4. put HD back in 486


edit: iamamoron ... you might need a 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adaptor, surely i'm not the only person who has stuff like this lying around "just in case" :-)

[Lobo]

Just do like WildWeasel said and split the file up into smaller parts:
Winzip can do this and there are also lots of freeware proggies too (e.g. http://www.dekabyte.com/filesplitter/).

I'm certain there was even an msdos command for doing this...

[myk]

Lobo said:
I'm certain there was even an msdos command for doing this...

Not a command, but a program; most versions of PKZIP will do that, as long as you use standard zip format (WinRAR doesn't partition ZIPs, I think, only RARs).

But CODOR's advice deals with it without even having to resort to partitions per disk.

[amberleaf]

Im pretty sure that there was a command for splitting files in ms-dos. I will look around.


edit- nah I was wrong but I do remember doing splitting via command line. Anyway there are plenty of file spiltters around

[Maes]

Thy question is quickly answered:

from Doom shareware v1.2 and onwards, the distribution fitted into 2 floppies, and iD used the "DEICE" unpacking utility.

The following files should be present (for v1.2), for later versions it should be more or less the same (I am not sure if a standalone v1.9 shareware was released, or a patch was required instead).

DEICE.exe
DOOM1_2S.1
DOOM2_2S.2 (about 1400 KB)
DOOM1_2S.DAT
FILE_ID.DIZ
INSTALL.BAT

Place DOOM2_2S.2 on a floppy of its own, and all the others on another, and run install.bat from the latter, that should do the trick.

About file splitting...to save both time and space, don't even bother with ZIP, especially with DOS PKZIP:

it was (and is...) terrible at splitting large files into multiple archives (you needed 3rd party utilites to do that, and then they couldn't *really* split large files into smaller joinable chunks, but only rearrange WHOLE files inside a larger archive so that it could could be (sort of) split into separate archives), and before RAR became commonplace, ARJ was used instead (any good old w4r3z d00d knows that ;-) )

In other words, no file inside a "multivolume" ZIP archive could exceed the length of the volume it was stored in and continue on another, only ARJ could do that from the start.

Even when they (if ever) added true multivolume functionality to .ZIP, it was subfunctional and uncomparable with ARJ's (it requires multiple disk swaps instead of 1 pass on each volume, and it had almost no recovery and individual volume handling abilities: if one bit in one volume was ruined, then NO FILE could be extracted from any of the volumes).

(Yeah, this turned into a PKZIP rant, I know, but I can't help it if it sucked :-p)

[Grazza]

Closed, as the question has now been answered several times.