While I love all the old games on GOG that allow me to replay many of my favorites, the fact is not all of them are available on GOG and I suspect there are some that never will be. This has me thinking about what alternatives might be available.

In particular, I am interested in replaying the two Buck Rogers Gold Box games. (I know their boxes weren't technically gold color, but, as they used the same engine, they are universally considered Gold Box games.) I am certain they were only released on 3.5" floppies. (I am also interested if I could somehow acquire the floppy versions of Sierra's King's Quest V and Space Quest IV, due to the horrificly bad voice acting on the CD versions of those games, which have no option to change to text. However, I realize that this is the wrong board for those.)

What I want to know is: would there be a way to load floppies onto a modern PC (such as is there a way to acquire a floppy drive)? Similarly, would you recommend DOSBox for playing those games? Is there anything else I should know?

Thanks.

If the disks are 3.5 inch disks. then you can just get a USB floppy drive and use that to read them. It should then be possible to copy them into image files on a modern computer, provided that the disks aren't copy protected somehow.

DOSBox should work for playing them; it's even possible (or is supposed to be possible) to play disks that boot directly into an OS (instead of running under DOS) this way.

Thank you so much for your answer. I was not aware that USB floppy drives existed. (I have a USB CD drive for a laptop.) The games I have in mind consist of multiple floppy disks, so reading them straight off the drive would probably not work. Copying them to the hard drive will likely be necessary.

A couple more questions: how would a game copied to image files be then installed onto the computer? Also, I might need some help with DOSBox. I had experience with DOS back in the day but it's been decades and I've never really used DOSBox except through GOG games (where everything is handled for you, of course). Is there a way to learn the basics of DOSBox?

Thank you so much!

You can mount your USB floppy drive in DOSBox as a regular drive and then install the game directly from the disks. The command is: Z:\>MOUNT A A:\ -t floppy

Again, thanks to everyone who is helping me out here.