I picked up a pair of MFM hard drives that came from two different QX-16s recently, and have finished imaging the drives using David Gesswein’s MFM emulator. Both drives were used with MS-DOS and only had a single partition installed on them.

The first drive was honestly not that interesting overall. There was a copy of word perfect for DOS on it with a bunch of personal documents from the previous owner. These have been removed from the files I’m releasing since they contain a bunch of personal information that should not be released online. They also have a BIN directory containg the utilieis that come with Epson’s DOS 2.11 release, so nothing very special there. There was also GAMES direfctory containg a basic game for GW-BASIC, that appears to be a side-scrolling shooter. There is also a DOS program from 1994 that allows you to take a practice exam for your nursing license.

The second drive was the more interesting of the two. This one came from a QX-16 that was in use at Epson of America. It has several development tools on it (MASM and a C compiler), as well as QX-16 versions of crosstalk and kermit. I also found several FAX’s written in MS-Word that talked about various bugs and release of DOS for the QX-16. However the coolest find was that on this drive there was a complete and buildable version of MS-DOS 2.11 for the Epson QX-16. This includes the OEM specific parts such as the format module and the source for IBMBIO.COM (IO.SYS) that are specific to the Epson QX-16.