best way of moving files to a DOS machine?

"For a permanent solution your best bet is getting the NIC working. You'll need DOS drivers for the NIC. Check 3com's website to see if they still have them for your model.

If you're connecting directly to your Vista machine, you'll need a crossover cable (pins 1,2,4 and 6 are swapped). You can buy one or make one. If your using a hub or switch, a standard cat5 cable will do.

The various ways of adding networking to a DOS machine are too numerous to discuss here but here are a few links that will get you started:

http://www.dendarii.co.uk/FAQs/dos-net.html

http://bbright.tripod.com/information/dosnetwork.htm

http://www.freedosdotorg/freedos/news/technote/157.html

If you succeed in getting TCP/IP running you'll have the benefit of being able to run a TUI web browser such as Lynx so you can download files directly to your DOS machine."

"If this is a one-time need (i.e. you do not add games ofter), then the easiest way may be to remove the hard drive from the dos box and attach it to your Vista machine via a USB adapter (assuming your Vista machine does not have a free IDE connector). Dump the files down the line then return it to your Dos machine.

Be careful not to format the drive when Vista sees it for the first time."

"Wouldn't the best idea be to run the games in a DOS emulator on your Windows machine? For example DOSBox.

http://www.dosbox.com/"

"Here's a collection of solutions by weight I prefer:

Format your USB sticks as FAT16 and turn on the legacy USB mode in your BIOS (if it exists) to present these as drive letters when you boot. Then DOS can read them.
Create a bootable USB disk for a small version of linux or NetBSD with no X11. This will likely support your network interface card AND be able to mount your DOS drive. You can then periodically ftp, or SMB over files you want. This does require a reboot every so often.
Use a cross over serial cable and an X Y or Z-Modem program like dsz or fdsz from the BBS days. Or with a terminal program that supports these, there were so many. I used Qmodem, which may still not be free.
Get the DOS drivers for the NIC and use it with a program like Arachne.
Ditch DOS in favor of FreeDOS or DR-DOS. But you're basically still doing the above, except that you might get better NIC and USB support.
EMULATE. DosBox is so much easier to work with than a PC AT.
Periodically move the drive. This is much easier if you just use the drive in USB mode and set your BIOS to support USB drives in legacy mode. Otherwise it's very annoying to have to open stuff and remove the 40 pin IDE and 4 pin power molex.
Get a super new-fangled bios, or install grub. NetBoot this machine off of a tftp server that hosts a mini-linux system that only runs dosBox or freeDOS with drives mapped to an nfs server. Now any time you turn off your dos machine you can mount and work with the image file and other files on your main machine or server. This is actually a lot of work, but you'll feel like some kind of DOS genius."

"See if you have any connections in Vista box for the DOS hard drive. If not, you should be able to scavenge or get one really cheap.

Move the hard drive into your Vista box and move the files onto that drive. Then re-mount the drive back in your DOS box."