re: 2.88MB images

Hi, I think things should be relatively easy for you:
- extend RAREAD to allow dumping other drives than A:
- select a RAM disk that can simulate a floppy close enough (TDSK, BITDISK, ...)
- sys should be okay for you, I think (or does it try to store some BIOS drive
  number in the boot sector that would have the wrong value for a RAM disk???)

A "format" that can write images would be nice, too. But you cannot SYS an
image either. You would have to dump the image to the RAM disk, which is
already formatted by its own powers, so "format" is not needed.

However, if you have Linux:

mkdosfs 0.4, 27th February 1997 for MS-DOS/FAT/FAT32 FS
Usage: mkdosfs [OPTIONS] /dev/name [blocks]

  -c            Check filesystem as is gets built
  -f <num>      Number of FATs (between 1 and 4)
  -F <num>      FAT size (12, 16, or 32)
  -i <id>       Volume ID as hexadecimal number (i.e. 0x0410)
  -l <filename> Bad block filename
  -m <filename> Boot message filename--text is used as a boot message
  -n <name>     Volume name
  -r <num>      Root directory entries (not applicable to FAT32)
  -s <num>      Sectors per cluster (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, or 128)
  -v            Verbose execution

"/dev/name" may be a real disk device or an image. You can mount the
image to access the files, use mtools with it to access the files, and
use it with Bochs of Dosemu to boot from and/or to SYS it (there is no
Linux tool to SYS a disk with DOS directly, as you may imagine). Sorry,
but my MKDOSFS is damn old. It may have become a lot better in the meantime.

Well. In short: I recommend to make RAREAD flexible enough to dump a RAM
disk. Should be enough for your needs. However, you cannot BOOT from your
RAM disk for experiments. I recommend that you are either good and get
the image right right away or use a CD-RW for testing :-).

Eric