burned the GAME.INST (renamed to .CUE) and GAME.GOG as image on CD, put it into my DOS rig and ran install.exe,
it installs some files and then fails with "Error: extractor returned status: 4" if it's at SPHERE.EXE to copy... no further files are copied, so the game won't run properly (of course)...

any help?
thx!

AFAIK, none of GOG's games can be installed on anything less than Win XP. Your best bet would probably be to install the game on a Windows rig, then copy the files over to your DOS rig.

but then i don't have (in some games) any cd sound?! and the folder of THIS game is only 1,6 MB in size, the cd image contains speech which makes it total size of about 90 MB...
DOSBox is just an emulator, the files are real, I don't see the point why it can't be installed on "anything less than XP"...

i'm sure there's a solution. let's wait for other answers.

thx

I was referring to the installer executable itself, it won't work on anything except XP or higher, hence why I suggested a simple file copy. CD sound in these games is accomplished through DOSBox emulating the cd drive and mounting the correct CD image. In theory, if you copy the game files over, then burn the CD image to a disk, the game should just work without needing to try and run the installer.

referring to this game:

the folder containing the dos files on my windows rig has about 1,6 MB.
the cd-image GAME.INST/GAME.GOG has about 75MB, browsing this burned on CD on my DOS rig it contains about xx MB speech file(s).

copying just the XP folder to my DOS rig would play the game without cd access (speech) IF ever... so i want to run the CD installer (as usual back then), copy some files, and the rest is loaded on demand from CD.

i don't talk about the xp installer which also installs dosbox and configures all for one-click usage.

That makes no sense. You shouldn't need to run the install.exe at all if you copied the DRAGON directory over to your DOS machine and have the cd image already burned to disk. The GOG installed files are already set up to use the data on the cd. The GOG launcher does not do anything special or different than what you would normally do in DOS to simply run the game from the already installed files.

EDIT - For example, with this game, all the DOSBox launcher does is mount GAME.INST as an ISO, change directories to the DRAGON directory, then run DRAGON.BAT. All you should need to do is the same, except instead of the mounting of the file as an ISO, you'll have the image on cd in the drive.

what's no sense? first burn the dos folder on cd, then burn the image? wasting one more CD just to get the files from the windows installed dosfolder on a real DOS machine? THAT makes no sense.

if you ever bought a real DOS PC game on CD, you set it all up from the CD. this is what i've been trying and the installer gives an error while copying the files. that's it.

EDIT: with your EDIT you're right, of course. my DOS machine isn't networked btw, so i could copy around the stuff more easily... but in my opinion it's not necessary if the cd image installer would work properly.. maybe it's my CPU? celeron 333?

I have installed real DOS games from CD many times in the past, but that is not what you are doing here. With the GOG version, you don't have the "real" install CD, just what is needed to run the game in DOSBox.

:) questionable... i have another try with another game from GOG...

As Cogadh suggests, perhaps what is going on here is that the CD image has been stripped down and has fewer files that you'd find on the original CD of the game. The files that were only used for install might be missing only leaving the ones needed for playing.

The game's system requirements are listed here http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/dragonsphere/cover-art/gameCoverId,11443/ your machine is definitely fast enough. It says it requires Microsoft MS-DOS CD-ROM Extensions AKA MSCDEX which according to [url=https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/MSCDEX ]wikipedia[/url] was included in MS-DOS 6 and later.

I agree with eyeball226 that they could have removed files need for the install to save space. I browsed through the cd image and didn't see SPHERE.EXE in it, however that file is already in the DRAGON folder.

Like cogadh said if you copy the "DRAGON" folder, which is less than 2MB so you could put it on 2 floppies, to C:\DRAGON on your DOS machine and have the CD you burned inserted I would think it would work.

Additionally, if "wasting" a cd is a concern, why not just burn the install directories from all your DOS-based games to a single CD, then copy the contents of all those games to your DOS machine in one fell swoop. You haven't really wasted anything then. You'll still need to burn a gameplay CD for each game that requires it, but you were going to have to do that anyway.

Why would you want to play it in vanilla DOS anyway? Sound and music play just fine in Dosbox version as long as you increase the buffer size, and it's also stable as long as you switch emulation core from Dynamic to Auto :).