Frustrated but not defeated, cleaned the drive heads in both machines, disk seemed to have no deterioration using magnifying glass. Still no boot either machine. Both machines tried to boot but each came back with non system disk message.
After a bit of headbanging on desk and putting grey matter in gear a bit, decided to try all disks to see if I could get any to boot the systems. Tried all DOS version disks, and utility disks with no luck. Put a disk in named mean 18 and lo and behold it boots both systems. Going through the steps to get the game up and running, ( golf looks so good in orange and blue
) the game played and I am a lousy golfer.After fooling around for a bit I exited the game to the main menu. It has 5 options with 5 being quit to DOS. Quitting to DOS, i ended up with the A prompt. Success.
Able to load PCTOOLS deluxe, and DOS RX, I verified and did a system check with them. Disk showed no bad sectors, the Nixdorf is slower than the IBM benchmark, and the Sharp is considerably faster.
So, I am assuming the boot disk may be OK, just not for either system?
Decided to read directories on disks that loaded and played, but would not boot the systems and compare to what was on MEAN 18. There is not much difference in the directories, that I noticed. However looking at MEAN 18, I see two files that seem not to be related to the game.
They are Command.com and Ramkey.com or .exe. My plan of action is to now format a disk and copy these two files to see if they will create a boot disk for the system without the golf game. And then just copy files from MEAN 18, to see what creates a boot disk without the golf game hopefully.
Am I on the right track here or wasting my time?
