Can I run vanilla from cd without a hard drive?

[invictius]

Got an old system that only supports a hard drive up to 200mb by the looks, and I bent the pins on the drive that came with it.  Managed to un-bend them, but it's one of those drives with just bare pins e.g no protection.  Can I just boot from a floppy, run from cd, and have the doomdata dir/my sound card install info written to the floppy?

[Linguica]

Yes, you can run Doom from a CD (there's even a special CD-loading icon!), but I have no idea how savegames end up working in such a case.

[Graf Zahl]

IIRC this needs to be started with the '-cdrom' command line option which stores the saves in c:\doomdata (with hardcoded path.)

I never actually used that feature, though.

[Uncle 80]

Unless my memory fails me, you can change the directory where the game data is stored using the -config [pathname] switch, to avoid using the C root folder. The config file and savegames are placed in the specified directory. It's been a long time since I've used this feature though, hope my memory is correct.

Edited June 12, 2017 by Uncle 80

[Graf Zahl]

The config is only half the story. You still need c:\doomdata for the savegames and that path is not configurable.

 

[Blastfrog]

Wonder if you could hack the EXE to change the directory?

[Da Werecat]

Should be possible. It's among the strings DEHACKED recognizes.

[LogicDeLuxe]

You can use subst to make C: an alias for A:, so Doom with -cdrom should end up saving on a floppy disk.

[RightField]

I haven't seen a floppy drive in 10 years..

[VGA]

I would just make sure it works running from a cd. Then you can hexedit the exe to use a path that points to the floppy for saving.

[dl_simc]

If savegames are not needed the whole c:\doomdata can be ignored. When trying to save the game Doom will display the usual "Game saved" announcement but in reality it's not. If the savegames are needed, changing c:\doomdata -> a:\doomdata in the exe should do.

 

The parameter "-config a:\myconf.cfg" loads and saves the cfg file to the floppy.
 

[Master O]

On 6/9/2017 at 7:58 AM, invictius said:

Got an old system that only supports a hard drive up to 200mb by the looks, and I bent the pins on the drive that came with it.  Managed to un-bend them, but it's one of those drives with just bare pins e.g no protection.  Can I just boot from a floppy, run from cd, and have the doomdata dir/my sound card install info written to the floppy?

 

Once you've done that, can you also tell us if you can run nuts.wad, too? :)

Edited June 21, 2017 by Master O

[invictius]

On 21/06/2017 at 0:10 PM, Master O said:

 

Once you've done that, can you also tell us if you can run nuts.wad, too? :)

I think that was possible by the pentium 3 era, there's enough documentation about that infamous wad online to be able to tell what systems it was capabe of running on.

[VGA]

Did you manage to run it from a CD or what?