I am a big fan of PhilsComputerLab.com. If you haven’t check this out, I urge you to do so, especially if you like DOS hardware & DOS games. I have learned some tricks I use today from his very explanatory videos he makes on his YouTube channel. (https://www.youtube.com/c/philscomputerlab)

I love the fact that you can tamper with old hardware and tune it that way, so it functions better, it can be extended in some way … whether using newly available hardware or software.

One of those things which caught my eye in one of Phil’s videos was Dynamic Drive Overlay Software! What is that I hear you thinking!

Well, I have this 386DX machine which has 2 drives from the same era (202Mb & 115Mb) in it full of games. I have less than 10Mb space left on both of them, so this puts me in the situation that I cannot install/copy an additional game for me to try on my retro rig and I don’t want to delete a game to be able to play another game, which we used to do back in the day.

Wouldn’t it be cool to have much more space, so I can copy/install my entire DOS Games collection on that machine? This is where Dynamic Drive Overlay Software comes into play.

The BIOS of my 386 recognizes hard drives up to 512Mb, which is way too small for today’s standards. I have several drives laying around from 20Gb to 160Gb just doing nothing. What if we could get those be used in my 386?

Apparently, the overlay software comes per manufacturer, so you need to take the one which is relevant for you. I have a Maxtor drive of 40Gb that I want to try to build in. The software I need is MaxBlast Plus. (http://vintage-pc.tripod.com/hdd_utils.html or you can grab it from Phil’s site: http://www.philscomputerlab.com/maxtor.html)

Be aware, since I am using MS-DOS 6.22 and the maximum hard drive space I can allocate is 2Gb, so to be able to have more space, I will need to create several partitions of 2Gb.

These are the steps that I have done to be able to reach my goal:

• Create the bootable floppy with MaxBlast Plus
• Build in my new hard drive into my 386.
• Boot from the floppy and let MaxBlast do its thing…
• Install MS-DOS 6.22 as a last step from the previous task
• Copy you whole gaming collection to your new MEGA drive and enjoy!

For the details I advise you to watch Phil’s videos…

Underneath you can watch my video with my experience with it … Enjoy watching!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZmQPdKubH8&feature=youtu.be