I would just like to comment that I was successfully able to use the
mcopy command of the Windows port of the
mtools program to copy files from Windows to a hard disk image file. I believe that you need to install Cygwin for the
mtools program to work, because when you untar the
mtools-3.9.6-w32.tar file, it creates several symbolic links to the
mtools.exe program, mapping various executable file names to
mtools.exe. For example, when you use the
mcopy.exe program to copy the files from Windows to the
c.img file, the
mcopy.exe program is actually a symbolic link to the
mtools.exe file. Some Unix programs like uuencode/uudecode use this technique to alter their behavior depending on the program name with which they are called. I no longer recall where I got the mtools tar file, so I have attached it to this message. You can visit
http://www.cygwin.com to download the Cygwin package, which allows you to run a lot of i386 Linux programs unmodified on a Windows system without rebooting into Linux.
1. Install Cygwin on your Windows computer.
2. Start Cygwin. You will then get a Unix command line prompt.
3. While in Cygwin, execute:
tar xvf /cygdrive/c/mtools-3.9.6-w32.tarThis assumes that you have saved the
mtools-3.9.6-w32.tar file on the root directory of the
C: drive. Cygwin mounts your Windows drives as:
/cygdrive/c for the
C: drive
/cygdrive/d for the
D: drive, and so forth
You can type the
mountcommand by itself to see how Cygwin has mapped your drives.
The process of extracting the files from the *.tar file creates a directory named
mtools-3.9.6 which contains the
mtools.exe program and the associated symbolic links. I copied all of these files to the
/usr/local/bin directory, because that directory is in my PATH, to make the mtools program names executable from the command line without having to specify the full path to each program:
cd mtools-3.9.6
cp * /usr/local/bin
cd ..Alternatively, you could add the
mtools-3.9.6 directory to your PATH environment variable by adding the following line to the
.bash_profile file so that the directory is in your PATH the next time that you restart Cygwin:
PATH=$PATH:$HOME/mtools-3.9.6When you first enter Cygwin, you are in your default $HOME directory. You have to create a file in this directory named:
.mtoolsrcNote the period in front of the file name. This file needs to contain a single line which reads:
drive c: file="/cygdrive/c/c.img" partition=1You can create this file without using vi or any other editor with a command:
echo 'drive c: file="/cygdrive/c/c.img" partition=1' > .mtoolsrcThe single quotes indicate a literal string.
This assumes that you have the
c.img file on your
C: drive.
You can then use the
mcopy command as though it were the MSDOS
copy command to copy files from your Windows hard drive to the
c.img file. For example:
mcopy /cygdrive/c/filename.txt c:When you are done, you can exit from Cygwin with the command:
exitYou can also access the files of your Cygwin $HOME directory from Windows under:
C:\cygwin\home\DefaultThe text files in Cygwin are terminated with Line Feed characters instead of Carriage Return / Line Feed pairs, so Notepad will not work directly on the text files in Cygwin.
This is longer than I expected it to be. Let me know if you have any problems with the steps that I listed.
I have Master of Orion v1.3 (the MSDOS version) running under Bochs on my Windows 98 system. My ATI Radeon 9700 Pro video card apparently uses so much ROM space that an EMS swap page cannot be set up, so I cannot run Master of Orion (MOO) natively. Running it under Bochs is nice, because MOO tends to crash occasionally, and a virtual reboot of the computer in Bochs is faster than a physical reboot.