Hi, I've been collecting roms and CD Rips of my old MS-DOS and NES games. I have a fine setup for playing them on linux with software like Lutris, Gelide, Vice and DOSBOX.
Last week a relative called me. His father in-law passed away a few months ago and his widow was now starting to sort his stuff to give it to the family, except nobody wanted some old harware and she was about to throw it away. That's why he was calling me. I am now the proud owner of a Commodore 64 with a datasette and 2 old school PCs.
I've been collecting old hardware for several years now, to rebuild the machine of my childhood, but with the best hardware available of that era. So with this new acquisition, I've finally have enough for a full working system.
Pentium Socket 7
Soyo motherboard with 4 PCI and 3 ISA slots, also both kind of ram sticks (DIMM and the other, smaller one)
Sound Blaster 16 ISA or Sound Blaster AWE 64 gold
Network card (BNC/ethernet)
Diamond video card
Creative 3d accelerator
2gb HDD
3 1/2" drive
5 1/4" drive
Zip Drive (IDE)
Creative CD Drive with remote control (WOOT!)
Now the thing is, which would be the easiest method to move my DOSBOX games and apps to the machine? the HDD that came with one of the machines made clicking noises so I had to put my own 2GB hdd, which is blank.
I thought about connecting a spare floppy drive but I have only 2 spare diskettes. Also I don't have any optical drives on my main rig so I would need to get one in order to burn CDs (and anyway I remember my creative drive didn't like CD-R disks)
Is there any way I can emulate all the described hardware in a virtualbox VM and then clone the VDi disk to the actual HDD via IDE>USB adapter?
What other methods would you recommend?
Thanks In advance