By the way, it's not cherrypicking, everything matters. Because that's how I have gigabytes of filled up space - small files that add up to lots of GBs of space.

It's an absolute waste to keep multiple copies of the same dosbox folder when you don't need to, or other duplicates or things you know you shouldn't be keeping.

Also, if you think a 100$ is a small amount of money/cheap, you're speaking from your point of view as a Canadian, someone who's making more than twice as much money based on the national monthly wage compared to that of a person in Central or Eastern Europe, which are first world countries with some exceptions (or maybe none now?), by the way. Where it's normal to have 500$ or less to spend on entertainment (actually, if you have that much you're considered rich in C/EE, usually you don't even have 200$ to spend on fun if you aren't making more than the average, esp. if you're living alone and have to pay rent - I'm not talking about myself right now though, fortunately I do have a house.). And we're not even talking about third world countries where people can have a monthly average wage of 200 dollars or less. In Europe it's usually about a thousand to thousand and half if you're from Central or Eastern Europe. I'm from Europe, but many aren't, so you can't go around pretending like 100$ is something everyone can spend on things you don't really need (since unless you're an avid collector you can just clean up that 1TB of data). Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wage, it can be an eye opener for you. ;) And it's quite accurate.

Basically, if you think a hundred dollars is not much, you're rich compared to most of the world's standards, and that includes many countries in Central and Eastern Europe (where food, clothes, games and furniture - basically everything except rent - cost similar amount of money like they do in Western Europe, but you earn less), and I find your approach of "oh hey, keep duplicates of the same dosbox folder because that's just cherrypicking (since I clearly said the games I have use the same one), but delete all other duplicates, are you sure you did that?" very offensive, implying that I haven't actually done that. As well as wasteful and hypocritical, unless you missed that part about me keeping only one of each version of Dosbox I need. In that case it's just wasteful and illogical, because why keep things you don't need? That way they pile up.

Also back in the 90s 500MB was a lot of space, so unless you were really rich at that time or had access to really large HDD for that time, you're just misremembering it. In 2001 we had a 40GB HDD and few years later (2002-4?) when we got a new PC we had a 120 or 150GB HDD (and back in the actual 90s, when we had Win 3.1/DOS, we had 20GB or less), and if you ask around, most folks from Europe in mid or late nineties thought that a 1GB of space was huge, because if you even look at games from that period, the biggest ones had 1GB max (2 if they were huge), and that's from the end of the nineties. In mid nineties most games had about 500MB or less, some even still had 90MB or even 60MB.

However it's a good suggestion to compress everything, esp. the installers, I haven't thought of that! Thanks!

Great idea, I totally forgot about that as I practically never compress things as I mostly just keep things I use. I'll try that now, thanks! I do have lots of musical and opera videos that could do with compression. What would you recommend to speed up the process to automate the process? I also use 7-zip.

Oh, and I forgot to mention - Skeletonbow, I don't think I'll be removing those duplicates of DirectX, DLL and other libraries, it's a good idea, bu I'm not actually a developer/programmer, so I wouldn't want to delete any DLLs or DirectX libraries that I might need. Unless there's an easy way to tell without risking that you'll have to reinstall your OS? I'm good with things like emulation and other stuff where you don't need to know programming languages, but I don't know if I'd be able to tell if this or that DirectX library, or MS VC++ library is something I can delete because it's a copy since I rarely manipulate the Windows folder itself, unless it's something according to a guide or things I know.

They may have originally shipped one DOSbox before, I have no recollection. The fact is that every game GOG sells wont likely run on one single version of DOSbox without problems however, and even if they may have attempted to do that originally they would have come to the conclusion eventually that it was not sustainable as the catalogue grew and the number of games to support became larger and encountered problems trying to have a one size fits all solution. You can google around and find problems with a particular game on a particular version of DOSbox for proof of that, and it will naturally change over time as DOSbox evolves and games that didn't work before or needed tweaks now work in a newer version and games that used to work fail for some reason or need different tweaks with a newer version. The same will be true for wine or any other similarly aimed technologies. It takes an extreme amount of effort for example to use a single dependency like DOSbox, and then upgrade it every time a new release comes out and go over the entire game catalogue and fully test every game with it on every supported OS and ensure the same level of quality exists. It just wont happen. It's a lot of extra engineering effort, quality assurance testing effort, support training effort and magnifies the number of potential problems exponentially due to all of the variables.

Even if GOG may have initially tried to do this (I have no idea, if someone else knows please pipe up) they would have quickly determined that it was going to be an ongoing support headache and drain on their manpower resources for no real big huge gain for the majority of customers. They would have had to make a decision to either change the way they use DOSbox to reduce support costs associated with using it by stabilizing each game on a single release of the software that seems to work best with that particular game, or to charge a lot more money for the games. How many customers would be willing to pay the extra money for them to do all of the extra engineering/QA/support work just to have the latest version of DOSbox and use only one copy of it to save disk space?

The reality is that the majority of people not only don't care that there might be 50 copies of DOSbox on their hard disk, but they most likely don't even know what DOSbox is and have never heard of it, they just bought an old game and want to play it, and GOG makes it easy to do that, so that's why they bought it here. :)

How do I know all of this? Do I have inside information from GOG? No, not at all. I'm a software engineer with 20+ years doing this stuff. I've manually configured DOSbox, wine, DOSemu, bochs and just about every other emulator and virtual machine on the planet both for games and for running other software in Windows and in Linux more or less since these programs sprung into existence. I know what the experience is like trying to get a single version of the applications to work with a multitude of software and it is a huge chore just as a hobbyist and tinkerer doing it for fun. But I've also had many years of professional experience trying to make a single piece of software that is a dependency of other software work with a wide range of applications and it is a huge nightmare in a scenario like DOSbox or wine which evolve over time and tend to break just as many things as they fix from one release to the next.

If you're doing it for fun and don't mind fixing broken things when something breaks for you as an individual then it's not necessarily a huge issue as the average person would have to do this with 5/10/20 games or whatnot on probably one computer on one operating system. It might even seem easy for such an enthusiastic hobbyist to do. A company like GOG however has to try to support probably 150 to 200 or more DOS games and do it on every possible combination of CPU brand/make/model, video card brand/make/model, motherboard ever made that is still in use, and do so on a half a dozen operating systems all with varying levels of updates installed, 32bit versus 64bit, single core versus multicore and a multitude of other variables, test the software and make it run with every game and then keep it working over time on all of these combinations. It is just unfathomable to try to do that and keep everything stable by randomly changing the software just because a new version is out, or to try to use one copy. The benefit of having one copy of DOSbox from the GOG side of thing is massively dwarfed by the benefits provided to them and to the majority of customers by making each game stable and reliable using a single version of DOSbox that works best with that one game, then perpetually supporting it and making adjustments to it only if and when there are problems that creep up.

I don't have any inside information or official confirmation from GOG that what I say above is their own reasoning in any official sense, but I can say that my own professional experience in the field of software development and my own experimentation with technologies like DOSbox, wine etc. and the burden it would pose on a software company like GOG are all too obvious to me from experience, and that it would not only make no good business sense to try to use a single version of DOSbox for everything, it would outright be a huge sink of their resources to do it for marginal benefit to a very small enthusiastic group of users who arguably know enough about the software themselves that they can manage to do it on their own and only have to support one computer on one operating system instead of the massive grid of variables GOG would have to do on their end to support such a feature that the majority of customers wont ever even care about.

So if GOG did ever in the past try to use one version of DOSbox for everything, and they no longer do now it is because along the way they learned the lessons of what I just said above - that it is an unsustainable business resource sink to try to do so for a marginal benefit at best. The money spent on manpower resources doing that is much better reallocated to doing things like bringing new games to the store and getting them to work, development on the website, and other things that benefit the majority of customers and grow the business.

Now, if I were setting up DOSbox manually myself and trying to get it to work with games for myself on my own system without pre-prepared configurations courtesy of GOG or others, I would do whatever I could to get as many games working with one version of DOSbox on my own system because I only have to get it to work on one computer with one set of hardware and maintaining one version of DOSbox would be optimal for me. I wouldn't have millions of users to support with millions of problems that are unique to their personal hardware configuration that I can't reproduce in my lab and end up having to issue a refund and lose money. :)

So I can certainly appreciate why an individual person would want to use one copy of DOSbox for various reasons themselves on their own customized system for tinkering as a hobbyist, and I'd probably do that myself if I were in a mood for tinkering everything by hand too. That's a long stretch from trying to run a business and do what GOG does and support a stable reliable product for millons of people however. There's a huge difference between one person's system and games, and every possible combination of them on every computer ever made from the perspective of trying to run a sustainable profitable business and supporting such a wide range of variety of hardware and OS combinations out there.

So that's why GOG doesn't ship one single version of DOSbox and probably never will, and I don't even need GOG to tell me as it's just blatantly obvious to me personally. To be honest though, while I never searched the forums for anything I wouldn't at all be surprised if someone from GOG has actually said what I've said above before although probably in 1/10th as many words or less. :)

Anyhow, some food for thought. :)

In absolute terms that's true of course, however the point I try to make is that in relative terms it is negligible and insignificnat to be concerned about in the grand scheme of things. Let me give an analogy.


Someone owns 2 full size refrigerators and 2 full size freezers of which are aging and not anywhere near peak efficiency or current standards. You visit their house and leave their 40 watt bathroom light on for 15 minutes forgetting to turn it off and they get angry with you for wasting electricity and tell you they're trying to conserve electricity because they have a high power bill. Sure, they have the right idea - reduce electrical consumption, but they are cherry picking turning off the bathroom light as a conservation strategy that will reduce their power bill when it is actually an insignificant portion of their overall electrical usage, all while completely ignoring the fact that the highest draw on their power bill would be the 4 freezers they're running 24/7 unnecessarily, possibly an air conditioner or heater and other power heavy appliances.

Like the bathroom lightbulb, I'm suggesting that the disk space multiple copies of DOSbox wastes is insignificant and negligible overall and that time and effort spent conserving disk space usage is better spent by examining what is actually consuming the most disk space on a system, then cleaning it up by getting rid of unnecessary files and obvious low hanging fruit first, uninstalling unneeded programs, clearing out temp directories that have leftover junk in them, Windows log file directory, etc. Rather than noticing duplication of something small and negligible like DOSbox, and then focusing on that being a problem - taking it to the higher level problem of conserving disk space then finding out what is using the most disk space and setting out to solve that problem instead. For the time and effort, this would likely be far more effective than giving much concern to a few megabytes of wasted space by DOSbox.

From the perspective of GOG, wasting a few megabytes of disk space per game installation due to duplication of a small amount of files is going to be seen as insignificant and negligible for the benefits that it provides both to GOG in terms of greatly reduced engineering, quality testing and support overhead, but also to customers who end up with a higher quality product that they just want to run and have it work. Most customers aren't even going to know what DOSbox even is or that it even comes with the games they buy, and wont care that some disk space is wasted due to duplication. Games include tonnes of files that are duplicates of things already existing on the filesystem. DirectX, Bink video codec, font rendering libraries, literally hundreds of megabytes of DLLs. It's much more important both to game developers and the average consumer to get a stable working product that is well tested than to be overly concerned about a few megabytes of duplicated files.


Perhaps I didn't clearly explain the point I was trying to make as you seem to have taken it to mean that I was suggesting everyone should go buy a new hard drive and that they should be able to afford to do so. That's not what I'm saying at all. Obviously if someone can afford to do so then buying a new hard drive is likely the most time and cost effective solution to the problem than micromanaging files on their hard disk to save 100MB of disk space, but that wasn't the point I was trying to make really.

The point I was trying to make is that if DOSbox takes up 10MB of space as someone said previously I believe, even if you had 100 DOSbox games installed right now that would be 100 copies of DOSbox times 10MB which is approximately 1 gigabyte. Just for the purpose of calculating how much money the space DOSbox uses on that person's hard disk in approximate Canadian dollars a 2TB hard disk goes for about $70 CAD at the moment if I'm in the right ballpark (but someone can go do their own math to get more accurate estimates if they desire and in their own currency). So, that's 2000 gigabytes for $70. So 70/2000 = 3.5 cents for 1GB of hard disk space. So 100 copies of DOSbox is "wasting" 3.5 cents worth of disk space. Now you can see why I consider this to be insignificant trivia. It's spending too much time/effort/thought over worrying about 3.5 cents of disk storage.

For the time it takes, just uninstalling 1 or 2 games would free up more space than being concerned about disk space being wasted by DOSbox.

I am only sharing information into a public thread being read by many people and one or more of the people reading what I am saying may benefit from the information whether or not any specific people yourself included may already know what I'm sharing or suggesting. I do not know who you are or what your personal experience is with computers, nor do I know what you may or may not have done already, and I do not have any way to gauge or measure that other than to ask you directly or make potential suggestions that could help you or others. If I'm telling you something you already know or have tried then I may not be saying something of personal value to you, but I am not saying anything offensive either. If you're offended by the ideas/suggestions I'm sharing then I'm afraid you're going to have to take responsibilty for it because you're offending yourself by taking what I'm saying that way. Words are not offensive, what you think in your own mind assigns offense or not. I'm sure there are people reading what I'm saying and learning something from it whether or not they're actively participating in the conversation, and I hope they find my suggestions useful even if it is just part of a conversation with you and others that are actively part of the thread.

As far as I'm concerned this is a civil discussion of different people's personal perspective son the pros and cons of DOSbox frontends, conserving disk space by reducing file duplication etc. and I'm merely contributing my own thoughts to that which I think are valuable if one's goal is to conserve disk space. People are free to agree or disagree of course, or to have their own ideas but being offended because of some potentially helpful suggestions that someone makes seems a bit hyper-sensitive to me. Try to think of the wider audience that may be reading this and how they may possibly benefit from the information, and don't take things so personally or read into things something which isn't being said. This is a friendly discussion. :)


For the record, I've lived in varying degrees of poverty for 2/3 of my life. I'm no longer in poverty now, but I'm not rich either. I remember all too well what computer specs were like in the 90s and through most of my life both in poverty and when I started doing better I've had hardware that varied between "behind the times" and "ancient". I've constantly struggled with having no free disk space and even right now my disks are crammed full and I'm fighting to free up space for GOG beta testing, Galaxy filling up my 120GB SSD with debug logs, etc. Not once while trying to find ways to free up space did it ever occur to me to search for all of the copies of DOSbox on my hard drive and spend hours deleting them and replacing them with one copy of DOSbox however because that would be a grand waste of effort that could save a maximum of about 5GB of disk space and only if I had 500 DOSbox games installed, however I have about 10 installed. So I could save about 100MB of disk space if I used one copy of DOSbox. To be quite honest, my farts are bigger than 100MB. :) Heck, this message I am typing right now is probably bigger than 100MB (including previous messages in the thread). :) <for those who may be reading without a sense of humour that is a somewhat self-deprecating joke for a laugh> Freeing up 100MB of disk space is completely uninteresting to me when I need 50GB of space or 10GB of space. Doesn't matter if my hard disk is 2TB (which it is), or if it is 100GB, 100MB is still pretty insignificant to really care about on its own. I'd rather search for things that are actually using up meaningful amounts of space that could be freed up and do something about that. To be clear so that nobody is *cough* offended *cough* - I'm not implying that someone else reading this does not do the same thing, nor would I have any way to know whether they do or not.

Right, I wouldn't remove duplicates of DirectX or other DLLs, rather if one wanted to what I was suggesting is that the multiple copies can still exist in terms of what applications see exists on disk where they expect them to be, but without actually wasting the disk space of having multiple copies. That's what a hardlink does, it essentially makes a single file that is stored on disk have more than one filename appear in the filesystem which can appear in 2 or more locations simultaneously. Accessing that file from any of the filenames accesses the exact same on-disk file however. So instead of having 10 identical files in 10 separate directories on your hard disk consuming say 5MB each == 50MB, by replacing all of the duplicates with a hardlink pointing to the same file - you end up with all 10 still appearing as if they exist in the same places they were before, but they all refer to a single copy of the file. It is kind of like replacing duplicates of a file with a Windows shortcut, but a hardlink is a lower level filesystem feature that looks and works just like a normal file rather than the limitations of a shortcut. Keep in mind that all of the files being replaced by hardlinks must exist on the same filesystem, you can't have a hardlink from one drive/filesystem to another. There are other mechanisms for that (symlinks, junction points, etc.) but I wont get into that.

Useful references for those who may wish to know more about hardlinks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_link
http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/linkshellextension.html (useful program for Windows for accessing this functionality)

DISCLAIMER: By explaining what a hardlink is and how it works, I am not assuming that any specific individuals reading this does not already have this knowledge as I have no way of knowing what knowledge or skill sets other people I've never met have. This information is written for a general audience and not just in response to this message or for a specific person. Lots of people are reading these threads and some are likely to be unaware of the subject material and benefit from reading it as it is not general common knowledge among Windows users. Hardlinks are a concept that is rooted in UNIX which Windows simply has compatibility under the hood for but keeps it hidden. Those who already know all of this and are reading it should likely be thinking "yep, I already know all of this and hardlinks are awesome" rather than something potentially negative. :)