tycho

I'd like to follow up on this, because I'm having issues with DOSBox launching from LaunchBox as well. For example, launching Space Quest IV using DOSBox. When launched from LB: Game launches with proper MT-32 music Digitized sound is non-existant - no sound effects or speech Running DOSBox manually, then starting SQ4 from inside the DOS environment: Game launches with proper MT-32 music Digitized sound works perfectly fine I feel like the "default" LaunchBox .conf file is messing with something, but I don't know where that file is located.

I dunno, maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree here, but I'd been using DOSBox 0.74-3 for a long time, as well as DOSBox ECE that I use specifically for games that I use a modern gamepad with, and I never had any issues. I had been running it on a Windows 10 PC, with a GTX 1070 at 4K resolution, and all my games ran spectacularly. I had custom config files for many games, but I usually just picked from three config files for the most part. Most games I have use Sound Blaster emulation, but I have a Roland MT-32 emulator for games that support that. Everything ran fine from LaunchBox. I recently swapped my 1070 for an RTX 3080, but I hadn't tested my DOS games because I had no reason to think anything would be affected. Today, after four months of using the new 3080, I booted up a DOS game and I found some hinky things. I have some games that I got from the exoDOS pack, and some of those have a sort of "pre-run" selection screen, where you choose what sound emulator or graphics mode to use for the game - this screen shows up garbled, and I cannot read the text. If I guess the correct settings and start the game, SB sound stutters terribly, and MT-32 sound slows down when loading graphics (transitions, animations, etc.). When I exit the game, the command line interface shows just fine. Some further testing showed more irregular sound behavior: Launching Space Quest IV from LaunchBox, then choosing MT-32 music at the "pre-run" screen loads the game and the MT-32 emulation, but then I don't get SFX (Sound Blaster audio). But running DOSBox manually (via command line, not within LaunchBox) with the same .conf file, then starting SQIV via the same batch file and choosing the same audio options runs the game with both proper MT-32 music and SB audio. Both methods still give me stuttering audio. Since I have not changed any settings or made any changes besides the video card, I'm assuming that is the issue, but maybe could be LaunchBox? Does anyone have any ideas for troubleshooting? P.S.: ScummVM games - and all other emulators I use - still run perfectly in every way.

I suppose you can use the same method outlined above using the ScummVM folder included in Launchbox's Third Party folder; the reason I made a copy in my Emulators folder was for the sake of avoiding any potential issues. A future Launchbox update may or may not change that folder, and then I'd be up a creek. That happened to me with my DOSBOX configurations when Launchbox moved the DOSBOX installation to that third party folder about a year ago. Simply moving the folder screwed up literally all my custom configs I had set up for DOSBOX, and it fixing them all took a lot of my time.

I'm not sure how one might "cancel" a windows system folder; ScummVM will, by default, create a folder for itself in %appdata% and place its configuration file there the first time you run it. If you delete the folder, the program will create it again unless you take the steps in my instructions. Doing that and making the batch files forces ScummVM to use your local configuration file with the relative path information. @epicfail's plugin effectively does exactly what I did - it makes batch files to launch each ScummVM game you have. The problem with the plugin is that it hasn't been updated in a while, the instructions are garbage, and it's not clear what the plugin is doing at any given moment.

I think in order to use command line functionality, bat files are needed. ScummVM doesn't look for a specific file, per se, but a folder. I did not have any success adding ScummVM as an "emulator" with command line parameters in Launchbox, simply because I could not target a folder in the Launchbox game options. Using the combination of the .ini file and batch files as outlined in my instructions above, however, works great.

Making ScummVM "portable" was initially daunting but surprisingly easy for me. I already had my ScummVM games integrated in my MS-DOS category in Launchbox along with my games that run in DOSBOX, but I kind of started from scratch in terms of modifying my ScummVM configuration file, to make the process slightly smoother.** Some caveats apply to these instructions. We are going to assume the following: That all your games that use ScummVM are on the same drive as your Launchbox build That you have ScummVM installed inside somewhere inside your Launchbox folder If those two things are true, the following instructions should work fine for you: Run ScummVM at least once, to create the scummvm.ini configuration file. It will be created in your %APPDATA%\ScummVM folder. Set your options for graphics, audio, etc. then quit ScummVM.** Copy the scummvm.ini file to the folder of your choice inside your Launchbox folder; I put mine in the same folder as the application: \Launchbox\Emulators\ScummVM [I copied this from the ThirdParty folder, to avoid any potential conflicts] Create a batch file to run the application using the scummvm.ini file you just copied. In my case: scummvm.exe -c .\scummvm.ini. Place this batch file inside the main ScummVM folder. Launch ScummVM using your new batch file. Now that you're in the main interface, add all your ScummVM games using the GUI. Once you do that and quit the application, your scummvm.ini file will use relative paths to refer to your games (..\..\Games\ScummVM\Beneath a Steel Sky\) instead of absolute paths (G:\Launchbox\Games\ScummVM\Beneath a Steel Sky\) This relative path structure is what will make this ScummVM installation portable. Launch ScummVM using the batch file again; go to the "Paths" tab in the options. Do not use the default values for these settings - instead, click on each option and set a folder preferably in your ScummVM folder. You can create nested folders in the main one, or just put them all in the main ScummVM directory. Now, your save, extra, and themes folders will have relative path information as well. Quit the application. Open your new scummvm.ini file in a text editor. Each game listed in this file will have a specific game ID. For Beneath a Steel Sky, it's "sky". You will need all these game IDs to create your batch files for launching the games. Create a batch file to launch one of your games by using this command: scummvm.exe -c .\scummvm.ini -f [gameID] - this will launch your game using the scummvm.ini file in your main folder, fullscreen. For Beneath a Steel Sky, it would be scummvm.exe -c .\scummvm.ini -f sky You will need to create batch files for launching each game; I simply copied the first batch file, changed the name, then changed the game ID inside the file. For example, Space Quest III became scummvm.exe -c .\scummvm.ini -f sq3 In Launchbox, make sure you're not using the ScummVM emulation option for launching the game; instead, point to the batch file you just created for each game. I additionally had to change each game's Startup Screen options to include "Aggressive Startup Window Hiding" and "Hide all windows that are not in Exclusive Fullscreen Mode"; otherwise, my game window would lose focus and I'd have to Alt-Tab back to it. It looks a little tedious, but it's pretty easy once you get started. Now all my games launch fullscreen perfectly, and I can migrate ScummVM in my Launchbox build to other computers with no issues. For the record, I tried epicfail's ScummVM launcher/configurator thing, but the instructions were all over the place, and the plugin wasn't really clear on what it was doing/creating. ** If you already have a populated scummvm.ini file, you can modify the path entries for your games manually after you copy the file to your preferred Launchbox directory. You can also edit the paths for the save, theme, and extras folder the same way; savepath=..\..\Emulators\ScummVM\ for example.

Never mind. I was using ScummVM 2.2, so I reverted back to 2.0 and now everything's working again.