DOSBox

[Revolutionary]

I was wondering if any of you have used any of the DOSBox frontends and GUI's?

 

The reason i ask is i have a friend who is in to Retro games and recently go a hold of several games for the PC. He isnt very knowledgable with computers so it would be easyer for him and me if we could set it up for him once and never need to worry about commands or keyboard short cuts again.

 

I could create a .bat file for every game if that would be easyer but i think a GUI would be "nicer" for him to work with.

[Nyerguds]

eh, it's a DOS emulator. It emulates DOS. There is no GUI for that. If you don't know the basics of DOS, there's only one thing you can do, and that's LEARN THEM.

[pichorra]

http://www.freewebs.com/erikgg/

 

D.O.G. For DosBox is a Graphic interface for DOSBOX. See if it helps you.

[Iran]

Try DOSShell:

 

http://www.loonies.narod.ru/dosshell.htm

[Crimsonum]

eh, it's a DOS emulator. It emulates DOS. There is no GUI for that. If you don't know the basics of DOS, there's only one thing you can do, and that's LEARN THEM.

 

No need when you have DOSShell Forgive me for not spending my time learning DOS (in fact I have learned it, but not used it in years so I've forgotten everything)

[Nyerguds]

Meh. What's there to learn? Just the basic commands set with 'cd', 'dir', 'md', 'rd' (or 'rmdir', not sure what it is in DOSBox), 'copy', 'move', 'ren', changing drives with "driveletter:", and then the basic system of working with parameters and relative paths like '\', '.' and '..', and you're pretty much set.

 

Besides that, there's some basic rules like "Any program inside a folder in the "path" variable can be run from anywhere" (oh that's right, the 'Set' command. Funfun ) and "Every drive remembers its path" so something like 'copy file.txt d:' copies the file.txt from the current path you're on to the path you were last on on drive D. And using 'cd' with a full path that's on a different drive only changes the path set on that drive; it doesn't automatically switch you to the drive.

[MrFlibble]

I completely agree with Nyer, pure DOS (or its emulation) is fun :laugh: With frontends, you're not going to get the retro "feel"

 

Also, mind that true, hardcore retro gamers don't use DOSBox - they have vintage machines finely tuned to run old games natively (sounds like a bit of obsession, eh? but it's cool )

 

(And no, I'm not among those hardcore guys mentioned above; I'm an avid DOSBox user and fan )

[Nyerguds]

Seriously people, if you want a frontend for DOSBox, install Windows 3.11 on it. I got original installer floppies if you need em

 

 

@MrFlibble:

Man, I've wanted to rebuild a DOS pentium for ages, but never got around to it.

[Irony]

I use D-Fend Reloaded.

 

It's pretty neat because it allows you to have different autoexec/config files per game

[MrFlibble]

It's pretty neat because it allows you to have different autoexec/config files per game

Do you really need a frontend programme for that? Just copy dosbox.conf, rename it anything you want, edit anything you need there, and use the -conf parameter to load it for the respective game.

[Nyerguds]

yeah, used to have loads of desktop shortcuts loading a separate conf file. I just put the game launch commands straight in the autoexec section.

[Revolutionary]

I Don’t want the front end (and you do get them) I know most of the commands (all i need) inside out. I have no problems with remembering commands.

 

like i said it is for a friend who otherwise would be ringing me up every 5 minutes to ask how it works and since he has go twenty game id prefer not having to spend all night setting them up and every night after that fixing them.

He appreciates the games but is a complete tech n00b, me fixing this started with him asking why the .exe files wouldn’t run and what .exe meant.

 

Right so ill have a look in to the suggestions and creating config file (i setup config files before just never bothered recreating them after a reinstall)

 

@MrFibble, don’t know about the early windows OS but been testing FreeDOS with the earlier games for some time now, I only wish I could put together a compatible computer and along with other things as well as personal projects I would use it for Retro gaming.

[Nyerguds]

welp, link him to this topic, and he has a nice reference guide in my post. I'll gladly explain to him how each one of them works.

 

ffs, nowadays some PC users are barely aware of the existence of directories on their system. This is getting beyond ridiculous.

 

Education >>> Automation.

[MrFlibble]

ffs, nowadays some PC users are barely aware of the existence of directories on their system. This is getting beyond ridiculous.

 

Education >>> Automation.

That's exactly what Frank Herbert warned us about (among other things, that is) in his Dune books.

 

"What's the purpose of those journals?"

"An Ixian machine records them. They are to be found on a faraway day. They will make people think."

"An Ixian machine? You defy the Jihad!"

"There's a lesson in that, too. What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking-there's the real danger. Look at how long you walked across this desert without thinking about your face mask."

"You could have warned me!"

"And increased your dependency."

[Irony]

While I'm more than capable of operating the DOS prompt (or bash for that matter), the convenience of a frontend is something I like. So yeah, I could just open dosbox and put in a string of commands every time I want to play something, but I don't see any reason when it can be reduced to an icon. After all, there's a reason we moved away from CLIs as the main way of interfacing with a computer .

 

ps. I forgot to mention that you can set it to automatically mount ISOs according to which game you're launching.

[Nyerguds]

A batch script can do that too

[MrFlibble]

Yeah. A frontend is not necessary to mount ISOs or launch games from desktop shortcuts. You can just as well make a separate config file for every game (I bet this is what any frontend does anyway), set it up to whatever configuration you want, write all the mount ISO stuff and the like in the [autoexec] section of the config, and launch any game with a particular config file using a desktop shortcut with a -conf parameter. Simple as that.

 

[Irony]

bleh, well I've got it all set up win D-Fend now