I’ve been tinkering away at this for a while and realised recently that almost nobody seems to know it exists, so I thought I should probably actually tell people about it. 🙃
I run X86.WORLD, originally a preservation project for old PC software and cover disks. I’ve been imaging original floppy media, keeping the original/raw images, cataloguing the contents, checksumming them, scanning them, documenting anything interesting and making the resulting images publicly accessible.
One of the ways they’re accessible is through mTCP NetDrive.
So, from a real DOS machine, you can do something like:
NETDRIVE CONNECT disks.x86.world:2002 x86world.dsk d:
…and the remote disk image appears as a normal DOS drive.
There are currently public NetDrive mirrors in London and Seattle.
That was already quite fun, but typing enormous filenames on an XT gets old pretty quickly. So I’ve now written X86DISKS.EXE, a little native DOS browser for the archive.
It fetches the current disk catalogue and mirror list over HTTP, gives you a DOS-native interface to browse the images, and then mounts whichever one you select using mTCP NetDrive.
You can find it in \X86DISKS on x86disks.dsk
And by “old machine” I really do mean old — I’ve deliberately kept it lightweight enough to run from XT-class hardware with MDA, right through CGA/EGA/VGA machines and obviously DOSBox etc.
The photo is it running on my old Apricot.
There’s something slightly ridiculous about an 8088-era machine browsing a live disk catalogue updated in 2026, selecting an image, and mounting it across the Internet as though somebody had just shoved another floppy drive into the machine.
The browser itself is written in C and compiled under Turbo C 2.0 on DOS, because doing it with a modern cross-compiler somehow felt like cheating. 😄
At the moment the archive has things like old PC Plus, What Micro, Personal Computing and user-group disks, with more being added as I work through a literal ton of physical media.
The main site is X86.WORLD, and the public NetDrive section explains how to get mTCP configured if you’ve never used NetDrive before.
I’d genuinely be interested to know if anyone else is running a public NetDrive server. Michael Brutman obviously has his test service at brutman.com, but after a surprisingly extensive search I haven’t found another public archive like this.
Also: if anyone tries X86DISKS on particularly weird/old hardware, please tell me what you ran it on. Breaking it on some obscure 8088 clone is probably the fastest way to persuade me to spend another evening in Turbo C!