Running DOS off a vinyl record is wildly impractical but deeply hip

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In the PC gaming spirit of trying to run software on the daftest hardware you can put together, I present to you: a DOS boot disk that’s actually a vinyl record. With a record player hooked up to a PC and data encoded as a soundwave inscribed on custom-made 10" vinyl, software developer Jozef Bogin has made a hip and wildly impractical storage medium to run DOS off. Why? Because he could, I guess. But now I need to know: can it run Doom?

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Our younger readers might not know of the DOS boot disk, a tool which was invaluable for fixing a busted PC. If your system wouldn’t boot, plugging in one of these USB flash drives (wittily shaped like the ‘save file’ icon, because they could save your files) with their own wee self-contained OS would at least give access to basic tools for diagnosis and recovery. Our older readers, I trust, will have no desire to correct any lies I might have just told.

It’s probably best that they weren’t vinyl, given how often record sleeves were jumbled in our house. When disaster struck, I’d hate to end up trying to boot from Black Lace’s Superman.

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If you want to get technical, Bogin’s post lists plenty of components and numbers. You can also download a FLAC sound file of the disk image to engrave onto a record yourself. It’s usingFreeDOS, a free open-source OS which can run software made for MS-DOS (the DOS you probably know).

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