Gaming DOSBox.....on a steeeeck!

[n122vu]

For those of us who are into classic/abandonware gaming, the thought of bringing your collection with you on a USB stick is novel, but the idea of running DOSBox from the USB drive itself can lead to more effort than its worth. You can load DOSBox but you have to manually map drives and run executables, etc. More trouble than what I want to go through when I'm ready to play. Well, I came up with a method that requires a little work, but once you have things set up its as simple as double-clicking a batch file to run your favorite DOS/Abandonware game. Check out my post over on my Windows Live space to learn how I set it up.

Nothing exciting. Some may say, "What's the point?" Others may find it useful. Either way, here it is:

http://becrane.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!1C7A62A4FBF6119!185.entry

 

[Linguofreak]

Hmm. I don't use a USB stick to carry dosbox, and I actually tend to mount and load stuff manually anyways, but it seems straightforward enough.

EDIT: I have gotten the Dosbox autoexec part of this procedure working on Linux. I haven't had the time yet to write a *.sh file for the *.bat file part, and I've not written a shell script before, but manually executing the *.bat part from the command line worked fine.

One thing though: You got ".." and "." mixed up. ".." is the directory above the current directory, "." is the current directory. As long as you're working at the root of a drive in Windows, or at the root of the linux file system, getting the two mixed up doesn't do any harm, since ".." from root is just root, but if you get the two mixed up in a subfolder, you'll get errors when the computer looks for files and subdirectories in the wrong places.

so you should have:

mount c .\yada_y~1
mount d .\yada_y~2
yada
yada
yada

 

[n122vu]

One thing though: You got ".." and "." mixed up. ".." is the directory above the current directory, "." is the current directory. As long as you're working at the root of a drive in Windows, or at the root of the linux file system, getting the two mixed up doesn't do any harm, since ".." from root is just root, but if you get the two mixed up in a subfolder, you'll get errors when the computer looks for files and subdirectories in the wrong places

Thanks for pointing that out. I realized that, but in my early tests, on my 256MB USB drive, .\ would not work, only ..\, which makes no sense. All tests were done on Windows XP Pro SP3 machines, with DOSBox 0.72. Perhaps I had a flaky download of DOSBox back then? Perhaps I had not had enough caffeine that day and had a typo in my path. Who knows?

However, I did just make a change to a .conf file and .\ did work fine, as it should. Still at a loss why it wouldn't work on my other drive.

Again, as you said, no harm in using ..\ since the .. of root is root. Benefit to making this change would be, you could copy the entire contents of the root of the USB drive to a directory on a fixed drive and still be able to use the shortcuts without making any modifications to the .conf files or the .bat files.

Thanks again for catching that. I'm off to edit my blog post with this correction. Let me know if you have any success with the *.sh script.

 

[Linguofreak]

Thanks again for catching that. I'm off to edit my blog post with this correction. Let me know if you have any success with the *.sh script.

I don't anticipate any difficulties. Doing it manually at the command line worked, and all an *.sh in linux or a *.bat in Windows does is to execute command line instructions automatically. There's just the minor technicality that I haven't written the script yet.

EDIT: Script written:

#!/bin/bash

dosbox -conf yada_yada.conf

Assuming that it is executed from the same directory as the *.conf file.