Dosbox Tutorial?

[gibberish]

I've never used it before, but I have used DOS before when I was a kid.
Firstly, what am I supposed to be running, "Dosbox" or "Dboxfe"?

Secondly, I put one game in the following location:

appdata/dosbox/games/crystalcaves

I know how to navigate there in DOS, but how do I mount the "Games" folder as C:\?

edit: uh oh, i think i figured it out. it seems to be installing the game now after running the install.exe. god knows where it's putting it though!
edit2: good lord, i'm playing crystal caves. it's been about 15 years...

 

[gruso]

Looks like I'm a bit late to the party here, and I don't have a Pandora, but here's some general info anyway for anyone interested (from my PC + GP2X experience, does not relate to Pandora).

DOSBox is the emulator itself, which gives you a (drum roll) DOS command line. DboxFE is the graphical front end, as shown here: http://pandorapress.net/2010/03/19/videos-dosbox-and-a-new-media-player/

When running DOSBox on a PC, you'd generally start by creating a new directory for DOS games somewhere easily accesssible (like "C:\dos" if you're on a Windows machine). Then you edit the [autoexec] section in your dosbox.conf file, to something like this:

[autoexec]
mount c c:\dos
c:

This mounts your c:\dos directory as your DOSBox C: drive, and switches to it upon launch. So you fire up DOSBox, get your C:\ prompt, and all the stuff you dropped into C:\dos will be there.

On the GP2X it was a little different. Each game needed its own launch script (say, larry.gpe) and its own dosbox.conf which might look like this:

[autoexec]
mount C "/mnt/sd/dosbox/larry"
c:
larry.exe

...and you'd also have mapper.txt for every game, which you would painstakingly experiment with until you have enough of your qwerty functions mapped to the game buttons. Then you launch larry.gpe from Gmenu2x, which launches DOSBox, which in turn launches your game.

And when you installed Larry 2, you'd set it all up again. It was fun, honest. Pickle did great work for us.

I don't really know the purpose of detailing all this, except maybe to give people an appreciation of how painful it won't be on the Pandora. Looking forward to seeing how it works for myself anyway.

 

[masterdetox]

The biggest issue i had was not being able to get to the damn c: (you can not type colon : )

Don't know if this will help others but to get dosbox working i -

1. Loaded up dosbox and typed the command (inside dosbox)

config -writeconf dosbox.conf

2. I then exited dosbox and powered up mousepad. I then opened a the newly created file in pandora/appdata/dosbox

3. At the bottom of the text file (under [AUTOEXEC])

mount c games
c:

4. Finally i copied all of my dos games to pandora/appdata/games.

Then it is just a case of starting dosbox. CD to the game you want to play and away you go!

There is probably a much better way of doing this but hey, it worked for me!

Oh I also set fullscreen to true. It is near the top of the file!

 

[Pickle]

both dboxfe and dosbox should have been setup to already mount the games folder? Was this not the case?
dboxfe has an option to "mount the drive" inserting the c: for you

 

[Clean3d]

Thanks for the tutorial, detox! Now I can run dosbox games too.

 

[gibberish]

thanks for the info but i think you lot should update your doxbox version or something. all i need to do is load dosbox, choose the default profile and press start. then i'm presented with a premounted c:\ and from there it's as simple as cd\caves and then cc1.exe to run my game (crystal caves).

 

[masterdetox]

thanks for the info but i think you lot should update your doxbox version or something. all i need to do is load dosbox, choose the default profile and press start. then i'm presented with a premounted c:\ and from there it's as simple as cd\caves and then cc1.exe to run my game (crystal caves).

Mine did the exact same thing!

But I find loading the GUI tedious which is why I went the whole config file route. Now I can bypass the GUI and just run dosbox directly (so run dosbox not dboxfe from minimenu). Means I get to destroy alien scum on XCOM that little bit faster!

both dboxfe and dosbox should have been setup to already mount the games folder? Was this not the case?
dboxfe has an option to "mount the drive" inserting the c: for you

Dboxfe did, dosbox did not. It is odd as from what I have read a lot of people it worked straight away in both. Not sure why mine did not.

 

[gibberish]

sorry, yeah... dosbox doesnt mount anything. dboxfe is premounted.