Extracting Ultima VII data files from floppy

[Christian Bryan]

Hello there, I have Ultima VII on floppy but cannot install the bloody thing on Windows XP Home edition. Is there some utility/method I can use to extract the game files off the floppies. I was thinking of using dosemu on Linux, but I cant be really arsed to set the thing up.

[Dominus]

why can't you install it on XP Home? Where does it fail? It worked fine for me (with the recent presnet of the original BG in disk format).

[Eric]

It's possible, though doubtful, that you may need to configure you're MSPrompt window to use only certain types of memory. ie... no EMS, EXT Auto HIGH. Then while in the MSPROMPT window goto your a drive (type A:). Then type either setup.exe or install.exe or whichever is the install file for BG.

btw, what's the error that you are getting?

[Christian Bryan]

I am getting the following message:

DOS ERROR
Drive not ready on drive D
Make sure that the drive latch is closed.

What this means I do not know?

[wjp]

hm, is D your cdrom drive? if so, try putting a cd in it. (a very empty cd, if possible)

[Eric]

Alright, to troubleshoot this here's what we're going to do.

1) Create a folder "Ultima7" on drive C (C:\Ultima7)
2) If NTFS give the EVERYONE group FULL security permissions for that folder
3) Now try installing Ultima7 to that directory

I'm assuming that 'drive D' is one of your hard drives or partitions and not your floppy drive??

This should more-a-less clone my install scenario as I'm running Win2k with NTFS. Win2k/XP are based on the NT system so it shouldn't make a difference that you're running XP.

If this doesn't work tell me what kind of files are on the floppy disks. How many disks are there?

[1010101]

Here's something similar I've found. To give a little background, I'm running Win98 SE, and have five drives in my PC. A: is a 3 1/2 floppy drive, C: is a hard drive, D: is an Iomega ZIP100, E: is a DVD drive, and F: is a CD-RW.

If I attempt to run the "Silver Seed" installation program from its original floppy (A:), I get the same thing (INSTALL.EXE reports an error about DOS not ready on drive D). The problem completely disappears is I restart the computer in DOS mode, however.

Maybe this will help shed some light on the situation.

- 1010101
(http://www.gameroom.com/1010101)

[Eric]

Hmmmm...

If you have a ZIP drive as 1010101 does than try disabling it in the Device Manager, else that or try physically removing it and installing Ultima7.

[Dominus]

the problem is that the installer doesn't expect anything alse than hard disks in the Computer and checks on availlable free space on the devices it can access. Having a media in all the devices like CD-Rom/-Burner or Zip-drive should solve your problem.

[Darkstar]

Hi,

It's quite easy to unpack the data files manually. If you have experience with the command line, that is

Well, the data files (SIDISK23 or similar) are actually zip-files split up so that they fit on floppy disks.
The two numbers (2 and 3 in the above example) tell which part of which zip file the file is. for example the file SIDISK23 is part 3 of SIDISK2.ZIP.
So what you need to do is:
- copy all SIDISK* files from all disks into one directory
- copy all SIDISK files corresponding to one ZIP file into one large file, for example with
COPY SIDISK20 + SIDISK21 + SIDISK22 + SIDISK23 SIDISK2.ZIP /B
(I use Windows Commander from www.ghisler.com, a filemanager which supports splitting/joining files)
You should get a few ZIP files which you can extract to a directory of your choice.

--Darkstar

[irinotecan]

Ah, yes. Good 'ol DOS programs that make an ASS out of U and ME.

A floppy installer that assumes that you only have hard drives. Nice. Well it could be worse....

I can remember (a while ago now) stumbling across a fine program that assumed that your PC only had floppy drives! Sadly, this didn't just mean that you had to store your data on the root of your hard drive, oh no. For this program also *assumed* that you wanted to format the drive first before it saved your data!

That was an easy way to get rid of that piece of steaming crap.

[Christian Bryan]

Now up and running, thanks for the help

Cheers

Christian