Backing up MS-DOS floppy games [Media preservation series]

All my floppy MS-DOS games are using HD floppies, and according to this:

games that were released on high density floppy disks, since no game (except for Lemmings 2 : The Tribes) released on high density floppies is known to use disk based protection

This makes our preservation work much easier, as we do not need a special hardware or tricks to make one-to-one copies of floppy disks or easy to “burn” floppy disk images.

My tool of choice for making raw floppy images is WinImage. I save the raw images with .IMG extension instead of suggested .IMA, because it seems to be more popular, and I am not using a compressed format. You can use IMG-files for writing copies of disks and mount virtual floppies in DOSBox with IMGMOUNT A game.img -t floppy.

The copy protection of MS-DOS games are usually based on some visual/textual tasks (e.g. checking an image/word from game manuals). Some older MS-DOS games distributed as double density (DD) disks or 5.25-inch disks might use some copy protection, and you may need to use SuperCard Pro, KryoFlux or other hardware solution for the preservation.

CD-ROM games are a bit trickier to preserve. You might also be interested in other parts of the Media preservation series.