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I wasn't attacking anyone. I was pointing out the features that are lost when you go that route. Sometimes you guys make it really hard for me to support your project the way I do.

and you loose the ability to: run games networked select advanced sound cards such as MT-32 or General Midi Use features in CGA games like composite graphics access all of the metadata that has been specifically vetted and normalized use *any* of the other features I have placed in my run.bat files use the all-seeing eye, gold box companion, and ultimapper addins preserve and transfer your save data from one install to the next transfer characters from one game to another (in rpg's that support that) etc etc etc If you just want to run a zip file, then why are you using eXoDOS? Just download a rom off the web and add it manually. You are literally defeating the purpose of the entire project and then running it through one of the least feature enabled DOSBox ports available on the web. If you thinke eXoDOS is just a bunch of games, then you don't understand the project at all. I also guarantee you my conf files run those games *way* better than anything retroarch and pure do on the fly. There are massive differences. I have hand created every entry in eXoDOS to ensure series, genre, dev, publisher, etc are all normalized across the entire pack. You aren't going to have three different vertical scrolling shooters listed three different ways (action, shooter, and vertical shooter for example). You aren't going to find Sierra On-Line spelled 10 different ways.

I guess I'm confused... as I don't know how what I wrote is confusing. You literally just hav to run setup. Then copy some xml files. and then move some folders. Anything beyond that is not necessary. LB stores games by platform, and each platform has an XML file. If you already have DOS games in your pack, and your platform is specifically named MS-DOS, then the eXoDOS xml will overwrite that xml, and you will loose whatever you already had in that category. Likewise, my win3x pack is filed under Windows 3.x. So, unless you have a platform with that name, it will not overwrite anything. Now, if you do have DOS or Windows games, and they are under a different platform name - you will end up with both in LB now. Something like MS-DOS and DOS for example. If you don't want one of those platforms, for example, let's say your old DOS platform had 10 games in it that are already in eXoDOS. Then you simply remove that platform from LB. If that doesn't answer your question, then I'll need some more specific details on what exactly has confused you.

I would suggest joining my discord channel and posting these games to my submission channel. I'm happy to include them, I just have to get them in my queue

Renaming the platform is likely going to break metadata links to the game images. This is a bug I've noticed with launchbox. If you change a games platform, it loses its images. So I imagine if you rename an entire platform, something similar would occur. You can add any games you like, but you are correct that a new eXoDOS version will want to overwrite the old one. Might be better to add those other games as a different platform?

sure. To merge your eXoDOS v5 launchbox files into an existing launchbox installation, do the following: First: Run setup.bat Second: copy .\data\platforms\MS-DOS.xml from the exodos folder to your launchbox folder copy .\data\playlists\* .xml from the exodos folder to your launchbox folder move .\Manuals\MS-DOS\*.* from the exodos folder to your launchbox folder move .\Music\*.* from the exodos folder to your launchbox folder move .\Plugins\*.* from the exodos folder to your launchbox folder move .\Images\MS-DOS\*.* from the exodos folder to your launchbox folder move .\eXo\*.* from the exodos folder to your launchbox folder

That's an old link. V5 is out now. Our discord has pinned posts on how to merge eXoDOS with existing LB installs.

Don't cry about being judged for what others are saying to me about your project while simultaneously accusing me of "riling up my goons". No one here is stupid enough to fall for that double sided bullshit. The keytojoypad project doesn't "happen to share a discord" with eXoDOS. It is a subset of my project that two of my staff members have been working on. As far as being a "target for mockery", Jesus man, did you just log into the internet yesterday? You are going to have a really hard time working on a pubic project with skin that thin. Before Pure was released and it was just a hype video, I got tired of those people you mentioned earlier asking me about it. After all, like you said, ultimately it's just another fork. And with nothing to actually even look at or test, it was meaningless and pointless. So, as a joke, our local bot (who makes fun of tons of stuff because my discord isn't some super PC hug time friend zone) responded to "Pure" with a cartoon of a person shaving their ass. Because shaving your own ass is about as useful as a version of dosbox that wasn't even released yet. Once you released, I removed the image link because the joke was over. But you couldn't be bothered to actually introduce yourself, or ask anyone anything. All you cared about was taking my guys work and then running away claiming to be a victim of Peter Molyneux (my bot). I guarantee you, had you taken the time to say hello and try talking to people there would be a much better relationship between our project and yours. My team is a group of people who have been writing on preserving and getting DOS games to work over 10x longer than you have been working on your port. So maybe, just maybe, there are people there who could have helped you, provided knowledge, etc. We have everyone from original dosbox authors, to specific port authors, to game developers (both celebrity and mundane), game preservationists from multiple organisations, and a hundred specialists in between. All active, friendly, and interested in preserving DOS games and making them work properly on modern hardware. But Peter, (who is a total joke himself and based on Molyneux's constant need to hype himself), made fun of you :(. And eXo is "riling up his goons". Fuck off with all that. If you want to start over, I'm fine with that. But playing victim like this is just pathetic.

Keep in mind that my response above was directly to someone who was asking me if I would be supporting it. It doesn't bother me if people use it. I was just explaining why it doesn't work for my project. Ever since it's first hype video I've gotten *dozens* of pm's acting as though I can toss out everything else and this will be the only DOSBox I'll every need. I was getting messages like that before it had even released, when it was just a hype video. And if I point out features it doesn't have, I'm either told "he is adding them" or "I don't use those anyways". So when I approach it from a rational perspective, one based on juggling multiple versions of DOSBox for years, it's hard to see why this particular port has generated such a fierce following so quickly. If it is still in development in two years or more, and it starts to reach parity with other versions like ECE and Staging, then I'll see if it brings anything to the table that I don't already have access to. For now, it simply makes no sense to put major lifting into porting my projects to a dosbox version that is lacking features I need and has only been around for a month. I've watched multiple dosbox ports come and go in the past decade. And the unfortunate truth is, the dead ones were all run by single person setups. The story of DOSBox is "good enough". Devs get whatever games they care about most working, and then basically just stop and call it good enough. Even vanilla dosbox has been stalled at version 0.74 for almost as long as I've been doing this. At this point, it is based on DOS 5.0 and is a hodge podge of diff patches and strangely emulated hardware. Buuuuut, in general it works.... So.... Good enough. DOS emulation is difficult, but it is also leagues behind other platforms (mainly due to the wide variety of hardware configurations and the fact that what currently exists is "good enough"). So, that said, it's going to take a monumental shift in the way things are done to really change that. Currently, Staging is the only project I've seen that is working towards that properly. And to be very clear, I was highly skeptical of them at first as well. They also talked about Gabe's as roms. But unlike the Pure author, they spent time talking to me to learn from what I had dealt with over the years and make their project better for it. They have shown they are dedicated to it, and they have shown they understand the difficulties they face. I'll take that over a hype video any day.

People love to try 5 or 6 popular games and decide that since those worked, the other 7,194 must work as well. Spend 12 years setting up every game in the pack and then come tell me with confidence that Pure handles all the games just fine. This isn't a debate. Pure is hyped up shit. It's not open source. It's missing tons of features. And it encourages game rips, which fucks over preservation. I will not support it. I already gave the long winded reasonable statement. I'm not going to bother arguing it with people. I will not support that piece of shit port in any way. It compromises the integrity of the original game and strips out all the choices I hadn't spent years creating to try and "consolize" computer games. You can not play over half the collection on a game pad. We have about 2,300 games mapped on our joy2key mapper protect. 2,300 mappings that the Pure author outright stole from our project. That leaves 4,900 or so games that have no support. So AGAIN, for those of you who want to play DOOM on your retropie. Have at it. But don't expect me to support some shitty port that doesn't work with most of my options and compromises the rest with assumed settings.

I'll look into it and see about adding them. Nothing says I can't make an exception sometimes. Maybe I'll replace the bullfrog games with the individual releases.

Pure is currently missing many features that I rely on. Keep in mind that I am currently using vanilla 0.74, svn daum, ece (an older version because they regressed pixel perfect functionality from it), and dosbox x. Then, I have another 6-10 custom builds designed for one off game compatibility. Such as MS Flight Sim 1, which does not run properly on any other version. The reasons I use all these versions are highly varied. DOSbox X for example handles games that use the DAC on pc speaker to play tones. This allowed games without a sound card to sound much better than standard beeps and boops. However, because it was a hack, standard dosbox, svn, and ece don't support this. I also use extended features like ipx/null modem, composite cga, mt-32, sound canvas 55 fluidsynth sound font, Tandy 3 voice, pixel perfect, scalers and shaders, 3Dfx, IDE pass through to full MS-DOS images, etc etc etc. A majority, if not all, of the above features are not supported in Pure currently. Personally, I don't believe there will ever be a single version of DOSbox that will be capable of launching every game. I am hoping that the dosbox staging crew gets close though. They have a pipeline for properly testing regressions, while also doing their work in a properly documented and public github. Pure is currently a single person who has a private repository and does code dumps every so often. Pure is, quite simply, a very basic version of DOSBox aimed at retroarch. So, refund that is great for some specific use case scenarios, it is *far* from being a preservation level utility. Pure makes a lot of assumptions. For example, it forces aspect ratio on. While this might make sense at first glance, we have lists of games that are broken and distorted by this setting. We have custom scripts in place to ensure games like this are run properly, no matter what settings outside conf files try to set. Pure also seems to want to treat dos games like rom files. Console games are preinstalled games with a very low amount of variation. They do not have setup utilities that are capable of thousands of combinations of sound, video, network, and game play options. Console game zips do not have raw media images in them that have to be mounted in specific ways in order to run properly. This means, that for Pure to run properly requires the game be a rip. It can't handle a bin/cue image. It can't handle an eXoDOS zip file that has the games bin/cue in one folder and the installed game in another. So, that means Pure HURTS game preservation by preferring game rips over original media. The reason I took the time to write all this up is because there is a ton of hype and excitement over Pure in the past few months. From my perspective it prefers butchered games, makes assumptions about your setup that can conflict with the game, and force you to play using whatever basic settings he already choose (vga and soundblaster, for example). eXoDOS uses original media, allows you to launch multiple versions of the same games, choose nearly any supported sound card, play ipx multiplayer, use shaders, use scalers, turn aspect ratio on and off, play with pixel perfect, use composite video modes, hear proper DAC audio, choose multiple video types, and honestly... There is a lot more but I have trouble remembering everything we have setup in eXoDOS. So for people who want to throw a copy of DOOM they downloaded from some abandonware site on their retropie to play with a control pad using basic sound and resolution settings, pure may very well be your easiest route. Not the best. The easiest. For a project that looks too preserve DOS games with their original media and as many launch options and possible... It's actually totally the opposite of what we need. I hope all that makes sense. Thanks for reading.

I understand your thought process, but using your examples, there is no benefit to tomb raider and tomb raider gold both being in the pack. Gold was the definitive release. For the same reason I don't put multiple versions of DOOM in the pack, i try to stick with final releases. If there was content on the original Tomb Raider disk that had been removed from the Gold version, then I would consider adding it. Magic Carpet is similar. The main difference being that the add on for it was released as a separate commercial download. For bullfrog games such as this and syndicate, it made sense to include the "plus" versions, as again, these are patched versions that do not remove content from the original releases. From a playability standpoint, the way it is set up now let's you play the games sad they were originally released, but also with the option of the add-on packs. I'm Tomb Raider's case it is the "Unfinished Business" extra level. From a preservation standpoint, I see your point, but I also wonder where the line gets drawn. Do I include every version of the same game that had a commercial release? Do I include every game as it was originally released and then again on it's final patched release? Over the course of a project this size, it could easily balloon by 100's of gigabytes, attempting to put all these versions in. And the bigger the set gets, the less people download it. Which in turn hurts it's preservation. All this has to be taken into account when deciding where to draw lines as to what goes in

the portable part is important from a distribution objective. If I am going to have a torrent that requires client side software, then guess what happens? My entire discord and email turns into tech support central. I already get enough questions from people who can't be bothered to read the included readme or just download the entire package and run "setup". They go and download a single game file and wonder why it doesn't unpack itself and run. I simply don't have the resources to support client side installs, nor is it good for preservation. As the software I rely on will eventuially stop running in windows. What if the thin client I rely on is dropped in windows 11? 12? Now I've spent years archiving things into software that is dead. Dosbox isn't as big of a concern because there are so many forks and ports. I don't see it going away just because of base changes to the OS.

most of those solutions don't emulate sound or video cards very well, if at all (in my experience). So you can get the game running, but no hardware acceleration, limited if any sound, limited if any networking, and usually the performance isn't great. Unless something has majorly changes since the last time I played with it. Also, those solutions typically require client side software installed - so they aren't exactly portable solutions.

I've spent a lot of time looking at a Win9x project. The primary difficulty right now is a portable solution that runs reliably. While it's possible to run 9x in dosbox or pcem, it is far from reliable when it comes to gaming. Each game also needs to be set up in it's own virtual drive, as it makes no sense to have hundreds or thousands of games on the same virtual drive. To do that, the primary technical hurdles is the need for a: 1: parent\child relationship for the images (a base c:\ with win9x installed and child images that also load as a c drive, but only contains diffs) 2: dynamic resizing VHD's. Need to be able to set the VHD up with a max size, but only have it take up as much space on the disc as it contains. Both of these technologies already exist, but are not integrated into dosbox or pcem yet.

when you run setup it will ask you if you want adult games. If you say yes, you get the MS-DOS.XML file from the xml folder. If you say no, you get the DOSFAMILY.xml file renamed to MS-DOS.XML and copied over instead. It sounds like your problem was you either didn't let setup finish or you tried doing stuff yourself before it had finished.

you can put the entire exodos folder on a different drive, and then use symlinks to make the computer treat it like a local directory.

I don't believe any of the games in eXoDOS have MSX compatible files in the folders. If a game looks like an MSX title, it is an IBM PC port of an MSX title. Not an actual MSX title. Which means it wouldn't run in an MSX emulator.

?

did you maintain the folder structure or try just dumping it all into the same folder? because it doesn't work like that.

That process will break games that have sound options, like mt32 and sound canvas, or all my special launch options like pixel perfect. And my next release has ipx networking for multiplayer and curved crt shaders, which would also be broken doing this.

The next release will have a build with a download on demand feature for those who don't want to grab the entire thing. Essentially, the front end will show every game, but doesn't actually download a game until you try to run it for the first time. For the current project, to do this is more difficult. You need all of the files in the project except for the ones in the games folder. Then, at that point, you just place the games you want in that folder. After you run setup, the front end will show every game, but only launch the ones you actually have. Currently there is no way to make launchbox detect the games that are downloaded and only display those.