Stick Drives

The DOS W&B will run off a stick drive without problems. However, there is a scenario that can cause confusion. Let's say you ran a loading in the usual manner on a desktop or laptop computer and then transfered the files to a stick drive. Later you use the files and find that the load has disappeared.

The most probable explanation is that you transferred the files before exiting the W&B program. There is a file, CURRENT.DAT, that holds the current loading for each airplane. You cannot be assured of it having been completely updated with the load you entered until you exit the program, and if using DOSBox, until you exit DOSBox as well. If the program is still up on the screen while you use a file manager or batch file to copy files to the stick drive, you may just be copying the files as they were when you first started the program.

The fix is simple, exit the program (and then DOSBox if you're using it) before transferring the files.

There is another scenario that applies if you're using DOSBox and stick drives with program versions built prior to April 2010. DOSBox interprets the time stamps on files such that it reports a file creation time as being 2 seconds different than the time reported by the DOS functions within MS Windows. The W&B program uses file time stamps to determine if a different version of the aircraft data is in use other than that used when CURRENT.DAT was last written. If the time stamps are different, CURRENT.DAT is initialized, and any load in it is lost. Program versions built after March 2010 use only the year-month-day part of the time stamp to make the check, so you can safely move back and forth between using DOSBox and not using DosBox without losing the load.