eXo

I fixed the issue this morning. As I suspected, it was a bug in the actual media. I located a different copy of the game online, ripped it, ran the install into a fresh copy of windows, and the issue is now gone. I've repacked the game for release in 3.0

Installing the games doesn't affect it in any way. The original file remains in the games folder and your torrent client will just skip over the new decompressed files. You'll be fine.

Sure, but presumably cleverest has decompressed that giant zip file. The decompressed set should match my individual volumes. I actually designed them to be able to all be placed in the same folder, and yet still seeded - as no file in any of the volumes shares the same file name with a different hash check. eg: A person can download all 5 volumes. Move them into the same folder. Re-point the torrent to the new folder. Allow it to hash-check. And be able to go back to seeding at 100%. So, with that known, pointing eXoDOS 3.0 at the file structure should have no problem hash checking the existing games and skipping any that are unchanged.

If you point a torrent to an existing file base, it will hash check and only download the differences. So as long as the content creator (me) doesn't do something stupid and start renaming files, it won't re-download existing ones.

The first issue with my collections is I have no control over how they are packaged and distributed other than the two official places I release them. The internet archive for example packages all 5 volumes into one huge set. Other sites do similar things, or add their own things, or whatever. As far as releasing a version that does not include the games, I would have difficulty seeing the point. Most, if not all, torrent clients allow you to select which files you want to download from a larger torrent. If someone only wanted the front end files, then they could simply select the front end files and not all the games. I suspect there would be great difficulty in keeping a "no games version" properly seeded. It would also lead to confusion over which version folks should have. 3.0 will include new games, but more importantly, it includes a TON of fixes to existing ones. A fellow from Russia began going through my collection game by game and creating notes on every problem he encountered. It is really quite amazing how much time he has put into this. I then went through and fixed all of the issues he noted, resulting in a much more reliable experience across the board. When 3.0 releases, I will provide instructions on the sites I release to as to how best upgrade one's existing collection without downloading much in the way of duplicate data. That said, 3.0 requires two major things for release: First, outlining, integrating, and releasing support for the collections within Launchbox. Second, finishing up work on my end with the new games being added and such. Regardless of how fast Jason is able to move on integration, I suspect I won't have my part done until mid-summer.

I'm hearing that there should be progress soon

I tested this on multiple versions of dosbox and through mutliple changes in the conf files, as I have seen cursors refuse to act properly when a game is launched directly from the win.ini file and not manually launched within win3x. Unfortunately, I had the issue every which way. What is odd however, is the mouse will select everything else. And other games I tried all played fine. This suggests the problem is with the game. If it was dosbox or windows, then I would expect the mouse to not act properly across the entire activity center, not just this specific game. I don't have a lot of options in cases like this, other than either trying newer SVN dosbox versions or attempting to locate a second image of the game and trying a fresh install to see if it behaves differently. A third option, but less common, is to find a patch for the game that addresses the issue. However finding patch notes, let alone the actual patches, for games during this time period can be fairly difficult. I'll keep an eye out for solutions.

Your meagre.ini file isn't seeing any of the data required to display the games. * Did you run the setup.bat file? * Do you have the games in a folder structure with special characters in the name? It works best in a root folder, such as d:\exo * Did you download the entire collection or just a few games? If not the full collection, you likely didn't get the front end files which reside in the games folder with the names gamesAdv.zip, gamesrpg.zip, gameswin.zip, etc.. if you don't have them, get them and rerun the setup file.

Glad you enjoy the packs.

Yes, that is the next full release collection. It is much more complex however than anything I have released to date, as it requires a dosbox-x branch which supports qcow2 images. At least 2 (a parent OS and a child w/ the installed game and modified OS files), but possibly a third nested image as well for save games/file changes. It also begins to tread territory that is pretty far outside of the original intended use of dosbox. The Win3x collection was already a huge pain in the ass due to this. Even though there is a lot of documentation on getting Win3x running within dosbox, most of the efforts had revolved around a handful of popular titles. I have not jumped into this collection at full scale at this time. An time spent on my collections has gone towards bug fixes and additions to my existing collections at this point. A guy who goes by the name FirstRun80 went through essentially the entire eXoDOS collection and documented every bug he could find, and then passed that over to me. I have also been in contact with a few collectors who previously had "closed" collections, but have now sent me some of their rarer games to fill in gaps within eXoDOS. My goal is to get a cleaned up eXoDOS released and use that release to coincide with full launchbox integration and support. At that point it will make more sense to delve into the w98/w95 stuff, as the dosbox branch I am using will be a bit more stable and I'll be able to modify my metadata to better fit launchbox. As of now, any work I do either has to be modified or have specific importers written for it. I'd rather have it all natively work together. Somewhere in there I have to work my job and raise my kids too But no worries, it will happen.

Once eXoDOS is fully integrated by LB I will these updated versions of each volume with LB packed in. Including several hundred new games as well as tons of bug fixes for current games.

I wouldn't know how it picked them up. Maybe from MEAGRE's export function? A secondary issue would be LB actually calling the launch batch files for each game. It's this file that calls the proper conf file and proper version of dosbox. And in the case of scummvm enabled games, gives the user the option to launch the game either through dosbox or scummvm. Either way, I'm sure we will get it all working eventually.

Well, that is sort of the point of eXoDOS, right? To make them work right out of the box. You honestly shouldn't have to fuss with conf files or anything if using my stuff directly. The goal is obviously to get that ease of use meshed with Launchbox's presentation.

I hate to be the one to say this, but this is not on me. I was told several months ago that Jason would be getting with me soon to get an importer built into LB. I've simply been waiting. I can't write an importer, because the problem isn't as simple as shuffling files around. The problem is LB wants to try to use it's own conf files and its own dosbox versions, and ignores the stuff provided with my collection. I can't change that on my end. And many games, especially in win3x, will not run with a basic version of dosbox. So until LB supports my conf files and my customized dosbox versions, there isn't much that can be done.

For those trying to get exodos into launchbox, I would personally hold out for official integration. The Win9x process has been somewhat complicated, but here is a very general overview of what I am doing: A: Unique build of DosBox X with better support for 32bit Windows B: Support for Qcow2 images. This allows dosbox to launch a parent image with the OS on it. The Conf file also directs it to load a child image, which contains the installed game files and any diffs in the main OS. Say a game installs some third party software in the program files folder, as well as files in the win95/98 folder. These would all reside in the child image, keeping the parent image a pristine copy of the installed OS. A third child image could also be mounted at play time to retain any changes made within the game world (settings, saves, etc). At that point, it is launched just like exodos/win3XO. One of the downfalls of the win3x collection was each game had to have it's own copy of windows 3.1. Compressed, this only added 20mb to each game, but over several hundred games that adds up to several gigabytes. It was also a shame when I went to add a game like minesweeper, in all 20kb of it's glory, and got stuck with a 20mb zip file, due to all the win3x files. The Win9x OS compressed is approximately 200mb. If every single game had it's own Win9x install, the torrent size would be well over a terrabyte. Probably closer to 2. And a majority of that would be duplicated files. Going with something like Virtual Box would have destroyed the portability of my collection. It would require the end user to install software on their machine first. That software would then eventually stop working in X amount of years. Dosbox is built in a way that makes it less prone to these issues. It is also constantly updated, so if a new version of windows down the line *does* break dosbox, I am confident a working version will then be released. I can't say the same for the majority of the virtual box apps out there, many of which have come and gone in the past 5-10 years. There are still some bugs in the Win9x process. I'm still in testing on it. I'll work on it until I hit a bug, submit, and then wait a few months for a new compiled version to release before going back to it again. In that time I work on bug fixes and additions to my current collections. My goals right now, in order of importance are: Finish the current batch of bug fixes and additions to eXoDOS Get eXoDOS support integrated directly into LaunchBox Release eXoDOS 3.0 with LaunchBox At that point I hope to have my new set of tools complete to begin auditing\building my Win9x database. I will also update my Win3x database at that point. Depending on compatibility issues at that time, I will either begin chugging away on the 9x collection, or working on an update to the win3x collection. Once 9x is released, I'll crawl into my grave and die, as I will likely be 80 by then

=) Glad you are enjoying it! Unfortunately, I may not be able to answer your question. Why, you might ask, does eXo not know how many games are in his collections? Why can't he simply check? Well.... I don't actually have them anymore. Not in that particular state, anyways. Once I release a pack, I immediately begin work on the next update. As I find new DOS games, I file them in. As I find patches, new versions, extras, etc... I update the base files. So if I were to count the number of games I currently have in any particular collection, it wouldn't match what I released previously. Your best bet would be to redownload the collections on top of your existing files. Assuming you are using the torrent version of my collection and not the ftp version (eg: Internet Archive), it will run a hash check prior to downloading a single kb. Ultimately, if you have all the games, it will eventually pop up and tell you you have 100% of the collection. If anything is missing or damaged, it should only grab those differences. That said, this only works if you have the collection in the same folder structure and such as my original release. If you have deconstructed it to fit a different front end, or something along those lines, then unfortunately my advice is pretty useless. However, there may be another way to find the final tally. I believe each collection has a readme file. And the top paragraph of that readme file has the total number of games in that pack. If you were to reference these 6 files (dos 1-5 and Win3xo), then you would have the number of released games for your collections. I would offer to do this for you, but I edit my readme files as I make changes... so those counts are already off on my side. I hope a bit of that rambling helps.

If you want to mass install the games, having already exported them from meagre, then you simply need to extract the zip files. Which you can do all at once. You don't want to run a batch file that runs all the batch files, because that would require user input (do you wish to install? Y, and you have to do that several thousand times....) Even if you bypassed the basic launch and directly called my install.bat files, you still get questions asked - such as do you want to use fullscreen or windowed, etc... Just extract the games zip files in the games folder, and your games will run directly.

Ya, the direct "importer" option would be comparable to the approach taken at the internet archive where approx half the games didn't work. Half working is still a significant amount, so it's not something to discount out of hand, but it still leads to lots of problems and it turns running the collection into a crapshoot. I mainly typed all that up to give fair warning to anyone trying to run exodos with launchbox using the existing methods. I believe the best approach currently is using the launchbox exporter that David built into meagre. It's not perfect, but it's by far the best option out there at the moment.

Indeed, there are two definitions of "install" here. I am working off of the assumption the the poster in question is asking how to install exodos games, rather than standard DOS games, as that is the thread we are in. The games in exodos are individually zipped. When you run the launch batch file, it will see if the game has been decompressed. If it has, it launches. If it has not, it will ask if you want to "install" the game. In this case, install means, decompress the games zipped files. There is no such thing as a traditional install with exodos, as the games have already all been installed. exodos wouldn't be able to run them out of the box if they had not already been installed. I understand launchbox attempts to install games by actually finding the setup files and running them. Not all exodos games include setup files. Or, if they do, they are on the original media (floppy/cd), and are accessed by being mounted in my included conf file. Trying to install eXoDOS games by running their setup media would be a very poor choice. Someone interested in this approach is better off going out and finding an uninstalled copy of the games; such as Total DOS Collection, (TDC). TDC is the better choice for someone who just wants raw data files and wants to setup the games themselves or use the front ends features to "install" the game. eXoDOS is the choice for someone who wants the game pre-installed, setup, optimized, and running. Out of the 5,000+ games in exodos, there are custom patches I've written or found to get several hundred of them running. Another several hundred rely on oddball conf settings, such as setting the CPU type to 486_prefetch, pentium, or some other option beyond the standard "auto". Or they require pcjr\tandy cpu's, or they require a hercules graphics card, or a special SVGA adapter (such as the tseng 4000) to run properly. Or they use a special cycle setting, etc etc etc. When my exodos collection was converted to power the dos arcade's online emulation browser (hosted over at the Internet Archive), the guys over there attempted to automate the launching of the games rather than using my included conf files. This led to just about half the games in the collection being broken (2,600+ broken games). So I would expect similar results, if not worse, by trying to use the built in dos games installer provided by launchbox.

Is it possible to install all the games at once. That depends on how you are accessing them through launchbox. In pure exodos, yes, you can - provided you have a terrabyte of free space =) Simply go to the games folder, hit ctrl-A to select all the game zip files, left click, and select "extract all". Then come back in a day or so, depending on how fast your machine is. This unpacks all the games. To run any game at this point, you can either run it from meagre, run the batch file in the games launch folder, or instead of using launchbox to try to run them as dos games, point launchbox to the games bat files (this probably isn't as easy as it could be). This sort of crosses over with the work that is currently being done to make exodos more compatible with launchbox. Treating exodos games as pure "dos" games isn't a great idea. It doesn't use my custom conf files, which do everything from setting to cycles, to setting the proper paths, to launching to proper executable. While educated guesses will get the mid life cycle dos games to run a decent amount of the time, the early and late DOS games are much pickier. When the next version of exodos is released, it will address all these issues, and launchbox will use exodos's existing conf files and know how to launch the games as intended. Essentially, exodos games will be treated as their own genre, instead as generic dos games.

The current project is to release an eXoDOS\Win3xO update with Launchbox packed in. It will be the included launcher going forward. I have no ETA on the process, as it requires some work on both ends to get it to that point, as well as actually finishing up work on the new games to be added to the collections.

Thanks Brad. For now I'll see if I can get things in the exporter handled. When we run up against a wall, or have it all figured out, I'll reach out to you guys to establish the path forward. If I lay the groundwork on the communities I am active in, in regards to expectations for the new front end, then I think the piracy bit is manageable. It will primarily be an issue if my previous users feel as though functionality was lost in the switchover. There is often a sense of entitlement in regards to, "I had this before, now I don't have it... I deserve it!". As long as the premium features are seen as things that are "above & beyond" the functionality they were used to, then I don't believe there will be as much of a problem.

Great info so far. Makes it sound like many of the issues can be solved in the exporter!

Couple of things: 1: thanks for posting the windows logos SentaiBrad. I currently have a custom "Win3xO" logo I've been using, but I'll keep these in mind. 2: The Win98 collection will likely be released by year. Splitting by genre, as I did with eXoDOS, is likely to still be too large for certain genres, such as Action (which, we all know, dominated that era). I'm using some very clever techniques to emulate Win98 via diff files, which allows me to have multiple drive images all loaded up together and emulated as a single drive image. So I can have one VHD that is the OS, a second that is the game along with any 3rd party software dependencies, and a third that stores preferences and saves for the individual user. This allows me to avoid the inherent issue of having to release a 200mb copy of the OS with every single game. As you can imagine, that would add up to several terrabytes of duplicated files right there. 3: I imported my Adventure collection into LaunchBox this morning and began exploring the front end. The first thing I did was explore which data was not coming over from MEAGRE as well as which data LB tracks that MEAGRE did not. It is a major concern to me that the game's year is not exporting\importing to launch box. In the DOS era, very few games had a hard and fast release date. Heck, you can find multipage discussions where archivists are simply trying to agree on the actual year a game was released. Sometimes we are simply forced to base it on the year the files are dated in the archive, when other documentation is lacking. Is it not possible for LB to track "year" only when a full date is not available? If not, it precludes a majority of games released before 1995, which is when release dates became more common. It appears the "series" information is not exporting either. I'm not sure if this is an issue with Donarumo's exporter or the way LB reads the XML. In MEAGRE I have 2 "series" fields to work with. I use this to link games that are not only direct sequels, but also of linked publisher game types. In other words, a single game might be in the Star Wars Universe but also in the Star Wars X-Wing series. Am I wrong in assuming that LB can only handle a single series field? If so, I'm not sure how I would go about deciding which series is the more important one to track. The idea, for me, is to link the games in as many ways possible, rather then segregate them. Also, it is a concern to find the manuals and other such scans do not currently make the jump. For copy protection, this is a key issue. As far as LB itself goes, I really enjoyed poking around the front end. it has a very clean look. I only had a few reservations about the frontend in general, in regards to replacing MEAGRE with it. First, is portability. At first I was worried about the fact it required installation, however further googling has shown me that LB is portable. I wanted to ask just how relative the path process is with LB. For example, meagre writes the actual drive letter into the ini file. So when I throw my project drive on a different machine and it re-assigns the drive letter, I have to run a little script that updates the drive letter calls. Is LB totally relative? Or will it require an update if the drive letter changes? Looking at the LaunchBox.xml, I am seeing several hard references to the drive it is installed to. However it seems to be where the MEAGRE export process defined things such as manuals and external websites as "applications". Maybe if we can solve the manuals/extras issue, it will solve this issue as well. Finally, and this is no fault of anyone here, I have to reconcile with the idea that some of LaunchBox's features are premium. I worry about the fact that my collections, while available at archive.org, are primarily distributed through sites which specialize in pirated material. This leads to people assuming that everything in the torrent is full versioned and free, and in the event it's not, a concerted effort to crack the software. That could be negative for both my project and this front end, as I get blowback from the community for including a frontend that requires registration and you get people trying to, and presumably eventually, trading cracked copies of your work. That final concern can likely be solved by keeping meagre around or some other type of solution. In the meantime, I would primarily like to look into solving the existing export issues. Assuming those can be solved, it would appear to make the most sense to switch over to LB as the primary front end. Going forward I can do a one time export into the LB format and then begin doing further work within the system instead of outside of it.

Jason Carr said I appreciate all your work there, @eXo. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help out or make your transition easier if you do choose to switch to LaunchBox for your releases. I have no problem with you distributing LaunchBox with the releases, by the way. :) Thanks Jason. I had tried PMing you a month or so back to ask about this, but I'm guessing it got lost in the intertubes.