[ FloppyBootCD — Documentation ]

FloppyBootCD

FloppyBootCD turns old boot floppy images into a bootable CD. You feed it one or more floppy images, it builds a boot menu with one entry per image, and it writes a bootable ISO you can burn to a CD-R or attach to a VM. It uses xorriso to do the El Torito work and bundles a known-good xorriso so you do not have to chase down dependencies.

It is useful when you have 90s hardware that boots from CD but no longer has a working floppy drive, which by now is most of it.

There is a GUI and a real CLI. The GUI is the main way to use it; the CLI is there for scripting and headless builds.

What it does

Takes floppy images: raw .img, .ima, .vfd, .flp in any common size (360 KB through 2.88 MB and up), plus WinImage .imz (ZIP-compressed, extracted at build time).
Builds a boot menu, text or graphical, with one entry per image.
Emits a bootable El Torito ISO 9660 disc image.
Shows a live CD-R capacity meter in the status bar so you can see your project's total against the 700 MiB budget before you build, with warnings as you get close.
Burns the ISO to physical media with your platform's native burner: hdiutil burn on macOS, isoburn.exe on Windows, xorriso -as cdrecord on Linux.

The syslinux pieces the boot menu needs (isolinux.bin, menu.c32, and friends) are downloaded from kernel.org on the first build and cached locally. No manual setup.

Install

The fastest path is a prebuilt binary. No Python, no pip, no uv.

Prebuilt binary (recommended)

Grab the build for your platform from the Releases page. xorriso is already inside every prebuilt, so there is nothing else to install.

macOS. Pick macos-universal2 if you are not sure which Mac you have; it runs natively on both Apple Silicon and Intel. The app is unsigned, and macOS 15 blocks unsigned downloads outright, so strip the quarantine flag once before the first launch:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine FloppyBootCD.app

Then move it wherever you like and open it.

Windows. Unzip it somewhere (for example C:\Tools\) and run it. There are separate x86_64 and ARM64 builds; the ARM64 build runs the x86_64 xorriso under Windows 11's built-in x64 emulator, which is the supported setup.

Linux. Four formats, pick one:

.AppImage, universal, no install. chmod +x it and run.
.deb for Debian, Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi OS, Mint, Pop!_OS.
.rpm for Fedora, RHEL, Rocky, Alma, openSUSE.
a raw .tar.gz, any distro, no package manager.

The x86_64 build needs glibc 2.35 or newer (Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12, Fedora 36). The ARM64 build needs glibc 2.39 (Ubuntu 24.04, Debian 13). Older distros should install from source.

From source (uv)

Works on any platform with Python. Install uv, install xorriso, then install FloppyBootCD as a uv tool:

uv tool install floppybootcd

xorriso is the one system dependency when you install from source:

macOS: brew install xorriso
Debian / Ubuntu / Raspberry Pi OS: sudo apt install xorriso
Fedora / RHEL: sudo dnf install xorriso
Arch: sudo pacman -S libisoburn
Windows: scoop install xorriso

Using the GUI

Launch the app (or run floppybootcd with no arguments). The flow is:

Add your floppy images. Drag them in, or use the Add button. Drop a folder and it picks up the images inside.
Edit the menu label for each entry if you want something friendlier than the filename.
Reorder the entries and pick which one boots by default.
Watch the capacity meter so you stay under 700 MiB.
Build the ISO, then burn it or attach it to a VM.

Projects save as .fbcd files, so you can come back and rebuild or tweak a collection later.

Using the CLI

floppybootcd [PATH ...]                       launch the GUI, optionally opening paths
floppybootcd gui [PATH ...]                   explicit GUI launch
floppybootcd validate <project.fbcd>          run the pre-build project checks
floppybootcd inspect <project.fbcd> [--json]  print a project summary
floppybootcd build <project.fbcd> <out.iso>   build an ISO without the GUI
floppybootcd --help
floppybootcd --version

build takes two options: --xorriso <path> to use a specific xorriso, and --keep-staging to leave the temporary build directory in place for debugging.

Examples:

# Validate a project in a script
floppybootcd validate my-collection.fbcd

# Machine-readable summary
floppybootcd inspect my-collection.fbcd --json

# Headless build
floppybootcd build my-collection.fbcd ./dist/my-collection.iso

Exit codes: 0 success, 1 a command failure such as a load or build error, 2 validation failed or a CLI usage error.