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Crosmando: For some reason I thought DJoldgames was Czech...
Nope - Slovak. :p
If you want to see DOSBox done right just take a look at Boxer:
http://boxerapp.com

That guy puts a lot of thought into things most people don't even notice, and in my opinion user interface is the best when you don't notice it. here is an example of how much consideration a seemingly trivial feature, volume control, really requires:
http://boxerapp.com/blog/2012/03/03/seeing-how-the-sausage-is-made/

He is also responsible for Boxer Standalone, that the thing powering the Mac ports of DOS games here on GOG:
http://boxerapp.com/blog/2012/10/21/positively-agog/
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Darvond: Its really not that complex when you get down to it. When I want to run a dos game in DOSbox, I click the application, and drag it onto a shortcut I made. It does the rest automagically.
I actually tried that yesterday when I was trying to change the sound settings for GOG Strike Commander, by running the installer.

I dragged INSTALL.EXE on the dosbox.exe inside the Strike Commander folder... but what it actually did was to run my separate DOSBox installation, with its own config file (not the one that GOG Strike Commander came with). Meaning that it couldn't even find that INSTALL.EXE anymore, because my default DOSBox installation has different mount commands and stuff.

So in order to run the Strike Commander installer, in the end I ended up doing this:

- Edited the Strike Commander DOSBox config file (dosboxSC_single.conf) to comment out these two lines:

#sccd.exe
#exit

- Changed the GOG Strike Commander shortcut properties to remove " -c exit" from the end of the command line.

After that clicking on the Strike Commander shortcut takes me just to the SC directory, and I can run install.exe.

Maybe there is some easier way too, but at least that worked for me. Now I have glorious Roland MT-32 music in Strike Commander! (with the Munt emulator, of course)
Post edited February 05, 2014 by timppu
Don't feed the spam-troll...
I understand the OP's pain, in that I have no clue what I'm doing with DOSBox and when problems arise (and they Do with quite a few GOG games) I have no clue how to fix them, or, just to tweak to make things better. I don't, however, understand the question, unless s/he is saying that in addition to the game just starting like it does now, s/he wants that second window showing running speed and stuff to open automatically too.

But my real question is, when is someone going to develop a Win95Box?? I find it hilarious that we seem more successful at getting pre 1990 games written in DOS to run fine, while many, MANY Win95 games have no chance. What's up with that?
You know it's really not that hard if you do a little reading....

You're lucky you don't have to deal with boot disks to customize memory types, drivers and services like we used to have to do to run these dos games. EMS, smartdrive, Mscdex.... I don't miss that shit.
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MikeMaximus: EMS, smartdrive, Mscdex
Ahh! You said dirty words. Now I am going to have nightmares! DOS gaming was so irritating in a lot of ways. It made me nostalgic for the Commodore 64 at the time!
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OldFatGuy: But my real question is, when is someone going to develop a Win95Box?? I find it hilarious that we seem more successful at getting pre 1990 games written in DOS to run fine, while many, MANY Win95 games have no chance. What's up with that?
There is Wine at least:
http://www.winehq.org

It's not emulation, it's a compatibility layer and some things work better than others, but for most games I have it works great.
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OldFatGuy: But my real question is, when is someone going to develop a Win95Box?? I find it hilarious that we seem more successful at getting pre 1990 games written in DOS to run fine, while many, MANY Win95 games have no chance. What's up with that?
You can - with a virtual machine running Windows 95 on Windows 7. The misconception is that it should be harder to make DOS games run on Windows 7 than Windows 95 games since Windows 95 is newer and more similar to Windows 7 than DOS is.

The thing is, DOSBox emulates a whole machine with a DOS environment, it was built from ground up and without ripping any code protected by copyright from MS-DOS (that's also why it's legal). It's obviously much much harder to do the same thing with Windows 95 which is much bulkier, that's why it was easier to create DOSBox than something like "Win95Box".

So for now you have to use a virtual machine running a legitimate copy of Windows 95 or hope that Wine (that HiPhish mentioned) will eventually allow playing certain old Windows games on new versions of Window. I think that's far more likely than that we'll ever see a "Win95Box".
Post edited February 05, 2014 by F4LL0UT
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OldFatGuy: But my real question is, when is someone going to develop a Win95Box?? I find it hilarious that we seem more successful at getting pre 1990 games written in DOS to run fine, while many, MANY Win95 games have no chance. What's up with that?
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HiPhish: There is Wine at least:
http://www.winehq.org

It's not emulation, it's a compatibility layer and some things work better than others, but for most games I have it works great.
I don't understand this. At all. Sorry for my ignorance.

Can I run Wine on my Win 7, 64-bit machine, and then run Win95 games in it the way I can run DOSBox on my Win 7, 64-bit machine and then run DOS games under it??
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OldFatGuy: Can I run Wine on my Win 7, 64-bit machine, and then run Win95 games in it the way I can run DOSBox on my Win 7, 64-bit machine and then run DOS games under it??
Nope, for now Wine doesn't work on Windows at all.
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OldFatGuy: But my real question is, when is someone going to develop a Win95Box?? I find it hilarious that we seem more successful at getting pre 1990 games written in DOS to run fine, while many, MANY Win95 games have no chance. What's up with that?
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F4LL0UT: You can - with a virtual machine running Windows 95 on Windows 7. The misconception is that it should be harder to make DOS games run on Windows 7 than Windows 95 games since Windows 95 is newer and more similar to Windows 7 than DOS is.

The thing is, DOSBox emulates a whole machine with a DOS environment, it was built from ground up and without ripping any code protected by copyright from MS-DOS (that's also why it's legal). It's obviously much much harder to do the same thing with Windows 95 which is much bulkier, that's why it was easier to create DOSBox than something like "Win95Box".

So for now you have to use a virtual machine running a legitimate copy of Windows 95 or hope that Wine (that HiPhish mentioned) will eventually allow playing certain old Windows games on new versions of Window. I think that's far more likely than that we'll ever see a "Win95Box".
It may be a misconception, but it's a reasonable one. It should be easier to run Win95 games on new versions of Windows than it is DOS games. But Microsoft gave up on backward compatibility somewhere between ME and XP.

And I'm sure I have no hope of running a virtual Win95 machine on my new rig, because I have no idea how to even begin. And as far as a legitimate copy of Win95, I still have a Win95 machine and all the disks that came with it (Dell) so I'm assuming I have that, but I was always told that modern hardware won't run on Win95 because no Win95 drivers exist for them, which makes sense. If you make hardware, there is no way you can keep developing drivers for every Windows version that ever existed. This should be something that new versions of Windows would handle, but is instead another example of consumers not using their power of demand to demand that Microsoft do a better job of backwards compatibility.
Post edited February 05, 2014 by OldFatGuy
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OldFatGuy: ...
Wine i a compatibility layer, meaning when a Windows application requests certain functions from the operating system Wine serves as a replacement. Wine is primarily intended to be used on non-Windows systems like Linux or OS X where it lets users run Windows applications at (near) native speed. Wine for Windows is sill an experimental thing, but if it gets realised it could give Windows users the same retro compatibility as Linux users have. Some old games run better in Wine than on modern Windows.

Because Wine is not an emulator (DOSBox is an emulator) performance can be very good, but it always depends on the particular application how well it will work. I know I was able to run Planescape Torment in Wine without any of the problems I had on Windows, and that games had a lot of problems.

Note that Wine has nothing to do with DOS games, DOS is a different operating system than Windows. A Windows 95 game does not need DOS or DOSBox, it just needs all the OS features that had been dropped from Windows over time.
Post edited February 05, 2014 by HiPhish
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HiPhish: Wine for Windows is sill an experimental thing, but if it gets realised it could give Windows users the same retro compatibility as Linux users have. Some old games run better in Wine than on modern Windows
Ooooh, cool, then I hope it gets realized. Thanks for the info.
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OldFatGuy: And I'm sure I have no hope of running a virtual Win95 machine on my new rig, because I have no idea how to even begin.
First get a virtualization program, like from VMWare (thtere are other as well, but I don't know which ones)
https://www.vmware.com/

The program will guide you through all the steps needed to create "virtual machine", which is similar to an emulator, but not quite as hardware-demanding. It's quite simple actually, but slower than Wine. i prefer Wine, so I never really used a virtual machine for games, I just wanted to let you know you don't need to have a degree in computer science to use one.