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COPYIIJR For Sierra KQ III

Posted: Thu Oct 31, 2019 3:01 pm
by Chuckphd53
Finally found time to try and make backups of my old Sierra Kings Quest III 5.25 floppies.

I used COPYII Rev 6 which has a program COPYIIJR for the Jr machines.
There is also a program called NOGUARD that comes with COPYII that will need to be used.

I formatted some 5.25, 3each, and did the COPYIIJR FOR ALL 3 of the KQ III floppies supplied with the game.
Then I used NOGUARD on Disk 1 and it was for the file SIERRA.COM file.
But what I found was that drive A: had to be used for this to work properly.
NOGUARD asks for Source and Destination Disks, I tried A: and B: but did not work, then specified A: and A: and it worked...
Disk 1 is now a working backup of KQ III....

I then decided it would be nice to also have them on 3.5 disks, So I formatted 3 ea. 3.5 disks as typical 5.25 disk, 360K
Since the Jr defaults the 3.5" drive as a low density, this worked out fine, thinks it is a 5.25 drive.

Did the same as above and it worked fine, I have a running copy from the 3.5" disk, it started the game just fine.

There is one twist tho.... As I mentioned, using NOGUARD wanted both disk to use drive A:
Well the Destination was a 3.5", different physical drive, so you can see the issue..

But for my Jr setup I have my 3.5" Drive select line set up so I can switch it and use it as Drive A: and boot from the 3.5" drive.
I have a more elaborate switching but basically just using a DPDT switch will allow you to make A and B drives Swap with the switch throw.
If you need more info on this let me know...

So when NOGUARD asked to insert the Destination disk I just flipped the switch and it was happy to sww the 3.5" as drive A:

It has been 35yrs since I used COPYII Pc program to make backups, and while it was slow there was a great deal of satisfaction
that these old tools worked as if it was 1980's again.

I have other 5.25 floppies that need copying so it is nice to again have this ability and also drop them on a 3.5"....

Hope this was interesting...