Atlantico Posted January 7, 2014 Author Share Posted January 7, 2014 Hi! I'm a biiig huge fan of your program, having used Boxer on the Mac, this is by far the best DOSBox app on Windows. Now being an ex Mac user and Boxer user, I never had to deal with the particulars of installing from a CD. I have TIE-Fighter (collector's edition, DOS of course) and I made an ISO image of the game so I don't have to have my BD drive occupied with the TIE-Fighter CD (in these times of ample HDD space) When I used Boxer, I just pointed to the CD, then Boxer automatically copied the entire CD and installed the game - I know LaunchBox isn't quite as automated, but I was wondering if you'd be willing to give a step by step instruction on how to install a CD-ROM game properly (linking the ISO) on LaunchBox. I would be much abliged, but either way, I just can't thank you enough for creating this program. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted January 7, 2014 Share Posted January 7, 2014 Thanks for the compliments Atlantico! Yes, there are certainly a few gaps there with installing games from CDs. I know Boxer does an awesome job of making that process painless and it works tremendously well. I expect to implement a wizard of sorts in the future to make that process easier in LaunchBox, and I'll take as many ideas from Boxer as I can. For now, here's what you can do: Add a new game to LaunchBox and specify the title, but leave the "application path" blank. Under the DOSBox tab, check "Use DOSBox to play this game". Under the Mounts tab, click the "Add Folder" button and open your CD (or if you're working with a disk image, click the "Add Disk Image" button instead). If necessary, change the Type of the new mount to "CD-ROM/ISO". Finally, click the "Add Folder" button once again to add another mount. This will be where you want the game installed to on your hard drive. Choose your location, and then you should have two mounts: the first being your CD-ROM to install the game from, the second being the folder on your hard drive to install the game to. Take note of the drive letter for each; you'll need to remember them inside of DOSBox. Most likely your CD will be drive D and your destination folder will be drive E. Press OK to save the new game, and run it. DOSBox should open up, but no games will run. At the DOSBox prompt, navigate to your CD by typing "D:" (without the quotes) and pressing Enter. Change "D" to the drive letter you specified for your CD drive, if it's different. Now you'll need to start the installation program from the CD. Most DOS game installations are started by typing "install.exe" and pressing enter. If this doesn't work, type "dir /w" and press enter, look for files that end in ".EXE", and try those instead. Go through the installation program steps, and install to drive E:, or whichever drive you mounted your destination folder to. When the installation is done, hopefully the game will be ready to play. Close DOSBox, and then go back to edit your game in LaunchBox. Go back to the Mounts tab, and delete the destination folder mount (probably drive E), but leave the CD mount (probably drive D). Finally (whew), go back to the Launcher tab and click the Browse button next to Application Path. Go to the destination folder you specified for your destination mount, and select the game's EXE file. Press okay to save the game, and give it a run. Hopefully this works for you. The process should work for most games, but there are plenty of exceptions. If you run into any issues, let me know what the game is and I'll see if I can help you. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atlantico Posted January 7, 2014 Author Share Posted January 7, 2014 Thanks for the very detailed instructions! Everything makes more sense to me now, how LaunchBox and DOSBox interact with harddisk mounts and drives - that was the part that I had been "shielded" from by being pampered so by Boxer. I did hit a snag though, which must mean I did something wrong, I know your instructions make perfect sense. I followed your steps and everything went 100% smooth, Steps 1-9 went exactly as you described, I didn't have to change a single thing and the game installer ran, installed successfully and ran the sound setup successfully. When exiting the installer, it offered me to run the game now, but I chose not to and just exit the installer, to complete steps 10-12, which I did without having to deviate at all from your instructions. The application path is set to the destination folder specified earlier, where the game was installed (and the application chosen is TIE.EXE in this case) and the only thing mounted under the "Mounted" tab is the ISO image I made of the CD. The issue is that when I run the game it always starts the installer and not the game. The installer runs "ok" but doesn't seem to recognize any HDD mounted so all install options are greyed out (the installer says that this is because the installer program is being run from the HDD, for installing one needs to run it from the CD) The install program also refuses to setup the sound since it can't find the installation. The installer does not allow uninstalling either, since it does not "find" the install. It seems to default to drive C, I don't know if that is important because we used drive E to install the game or whether the drive letters are just placeholders with no real meaning, I forget it is a loooong time since I used DOS. This behavior is the same whether I have the ISO mounted or not, whether I point to TIE.EXE, TIEAUTO.EXE or INSTALL.EXE It does not change if I re-enable the mount of the destination folder, even though the install program seems to find the E drive. Other executables available are things to make a bootdisk and such, and just out of curiosity I did point to that program to see if the installer ran yet again, but the BOOTTIE.EXE ran normally and asked me for a floppy in drive A So the thing I don't understand is why I keep getting the install program when I choose the main program (TIE.EXE), and why is the install program behaving differently now than when I was using it to install the game in the first place. Finally just to try the obvious, I used the actual physical CD, mounted it as a folder like you instructed, but this did not work. I know I must be missing something, but I'll be darned if I know what it is! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Atlantico Posted January 7, 2014 Author Share Posted January 7, 2014 Wait, I got it working! I deleted the install and started again, and this time I did everything exactly as before except in step 10 I did not delete the destination folder mount. So both the CD image (drive D) and destination folder (drive E) are mounted and it works. However (oddly) if I remove the destination folder from mounts the behavior defaults back to the installing program and adding the destination folder (drive E) after it was once deleted does nothing to help. So as long as I don't touch the destination folder mount (drive E) after installing the game and otherwise following exactly what you wrote, the game runs and everything works 100% Again super many thanks for the instructions and for making this amazing program! It is peerless on Windows, I've looked far and wide for something like this. Cheers! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted January 7, 2014 Share Posted January 7, 2014 Ah, oic. Makes sense. Glad you got it working, and good to know that that's sometimes the case. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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