Specifications
converter 1.5
2000 - 2005 urr Sound Technologies Inc.
95
creating a bootable DOS floppy to auto-run converter
Since converter and its associated files take up relatively little disk space, the application can be run
from a single 1.44MB 3.5” floppy disk. This fact enables converter to become a ‘portable’ application
that can be run ‘out of the box’ so to speak by creating a bootable DOS disk that boots your computer
into ‘true’ DOS mode and auto-loads converter without intervention. Using converter becomes as easy
as placing the floppy in your disk drive and rebooting – very useful for Windows9x users who do not
want to modify the autoexec.bat file on their computer’s hard drive, or for those using an operating
system which does not provide proper DOS functionality.
There are two ways to make a bootable floppy disk with converter installed on it – manually, or by using
the self-extracting boot floppy image included in converter’s .zip archive. The easiest of the two is to
take advantage of the self-extracting boot disk image, so we’ll start by explaining this approach first and
go into the manual steps later.
Create a bootdisk using included self-extracting image file
Note that this assumes you have a 3.5” floppy disk drive as drive A: in your computer (this is most likely
the case).
Here’s the steps:
•
Find a blank 1.44MB 3.5” floppy disk.
•
Make sure you are in some version of Windows (9x, XP, etc).
•
Open the converter .zip archive, locate the file “cbootdsk.zip” in the archive and open it, and copy
the file “cbootdsk.exe” to your desktop or some other convenient location. This is the self-
extracting bootable converter disk image file.
•
Place the blank floppy disk in your disk drive and double click on “cbootdsk.exe” (the file you just
copied to your desktop).
•
Follow the self-explanatory prompts to create the floppy. When it is done, the extractor will
automatically exit.
•
Open the floppy disk using Windows explorer to gain access to the files on the newly created disk.
•
Check the
autoexec.bat
file on the disk and edit it (using Windows’ Notepad or Edit under DOS)
in such a way that the “SET BLASTER” line reflects the specific settings of your SoundBlaster
compatible soundcard (or if using a Gravis Ultrasound, replace the “SET BLASTER” line with the
appropriate “SET ULTRASND” line for your card’s configuration), and save the file.
( For more information on determining the hardware settings to use for your particular card, see the
previous appendix section. )
•
Check the file
hardware.cfg
to make sure that its settings reflect those that you wish to use with
converter for your particular hardware setup (soundcard(s), etc – see the section on “software
installation and configuration” in the earlier part of this manual).
And that’s it, converter is ready to run.
There is no need to place a mouse driver on this disk, as the open source cutemouse mouse driver is
already installed and will autodetect any serial or ps/2 pointing devices for converter to use.
For more information on cutemouse, please visit http://cutemouse.sourceforge.net/.