Windows – best way of moving files to a DOS machine

file-transferms-doswindows-vista

I've got an old DOS (read: abandonware) machine running my old DOS games (as referenced here). I'm finding that over time, my floppies are starting to die and become completely unreadable.

So recently i've been finding abandonware binaries of games i currently own and have downloaded them to my Vista box.

Vista machine has no floppy drives but has a CD/DVD-R. Vista machine has no serial or parallel ports.
DOS machine has floppy drives but no CD/DVD drive. (it does have a 100mb HDD though)
Amazingly, both machines have USB and ethernet. DOS machine has some ancient 3Com 10BT card.

I can't seem to figure out how to get FTP much less a TCP/IP stack up and running on the DOS machine, and no forms of USB storage have been readable on both machines.

Whats the best way to get these binaries over to the DOS machine?

(I know this is starting to sound like that age old question of how to move the fox, baby, and bag of grain across the river on a boat that only seats two)

Best Answer

For a permanent solution your best bet is getting the NIC working. You'll need DOS drivers for the NIC. Check 3com's website to see if they still have them for your model.

If you're connecting directly to your Vista machine, you'll need a crossover cable (pins 1,2,4 and 6 are swapped). You can buy one or make one. If your using a hub or switch, a standard cat5 cable will do.

The various ways of adding networking to a DOS machine are too numerous to discuss here but here are a few links that will get you started:

http://www.dendarii.co.uk/FAQs/dos-net.html

http://bbright.tripod.com/information/dosnetwork.htm

http://www.freedos.org/freedos/news/technote/157.html

If you succeed in getting TCP/IP running you'll have the benefit of being able to run a TUI web browser such as Lynx so you can download files directly to your DOS machine.