pcjs/disks/pc

IBM PC Disk Archives

Below are selected Disk Sets featuring "Ready-to-Boot" machine configurations:

• IBM PC (Model 5150), MDA, 64K, CP/M-86
• IBM PC (Model 5150), MDA, 64K, IBM Diagnostics v2.20
• IBM PC (Model 5150), CGA, 64K, Zork I

You can browse the rest of our disk archives by type. There is no search capability at this time.

Learn more about PCjs disk image formats here.

Disk Sets

Disks can be organized into Disk Sets (manifests) which can then be loaded by the FDC component of IBM PC Machine Configurations.

Example

An FDC (Floppy Disk Controller) XML file, such as samples.xml, typically contains <disk> entries like:

<disk path="/disks/pc/dos/ibm/1.00/PCDOS100.json">PC-DOS 1.0</disk>
<disk path="/disks/pc/dos/ibm/1.10/PCDOS110.json">PC-DOS 1.1</disk>
<disk path="/disks/pc/dos/ibm/2.00/PCDOS200-DISK1.json">PC-DOS 2.0 (Disk 1)</disk>
<disk path="/disks/pc/dos/ibm/2.00/PCDOS200-DISK2.json">PC-DOS 2.0 (Disk 2)</disk>
<disk path="/disks/pc/games/microsoft/adventure/adventure-1981.json">Microsoft Adventure</disk>
<disk path="/apps/pc/1981/visicalc/disk.json" href="http://www.bricklin.com/history/vclicense.htm" desc="VisiCalc License">VisiCalc</disk>

However, if you wanted to load VisiCalc directly from the /apps folder, rather than using a pre-generated disk image, you could do that with an <manifest> entry that references the application's manifest.xml:

<manifest ref="/apps/pc/1981/visicalc/manifest.xml" disk="disk"/>

The application must have a manifest.xml with <disk> section containing an id value that matches the disk value specified above:

<disk id="disk" dir="/apps/pc/1981/visicalc/bin/">
    <file>VC.COM</file>
    <file dir="../">README.md</file>
    <link href="http://www.bricklin.com/history/vclicense.htm">VisiCalc License</link>
</disk>

If multiple disks are defined in the manifest, and you want to include them all, you can set the disk value to '*', as in:

<manifest ref="/apps/pc/1981/visicalc/manifest.xml" disk="*"/>

As an added bonus, PCjs will automatically display the descriptive <link> whenever this item is selected, and it will dynamically generate a disk image containing all the specified <file> entries when the selected item is loaded.

Pre-generated images are still preferred, and you can now include those in the application manifest.xml as well, by adding an href value to the <disk> section that was used to create the image:

<disk id="disk" dir="/apps/pc/1981/visicalc/bin/" href="/apps/pc/1981/visicalc/disk.json">
    <file>VC.COM</file>
    <file dir="../">README.md</file>
    <link href="http://www.bricklin.com/history/vclicense.htm">VisiCalc License</link>
</disk>

The PCjs DiskDump module is used to create all our pre-generated JSON-encoded disk images. In the above example, a pre-generated disk image could be created from the command-line with either the "--dir" option (which will traverse all subdirectories as well):

node diskdump --dir=./apps/pc/1981/visicalc/bin/ --format=json --output=./apps/pc/1981/visicalc/disk.json

or with the "--path" option, which specifies either a single file or a set files separated by semi-colons:

node diskdump "--path=./apps/pc/1981/visicalc/bin/vc.com;../readme.md" --format=json --output=./apps/pc/1981/visicalc/disk.json

or via the PCjs server's DiskDump API:

http://www.pcjs.org/api/v1/dump?path=/apps/pc/1981/visicalc/bin/vc.com&format=json