tutorial TUTORIAL - Running ZIPPED DOS-Games via DOSBOX Daum

[Ize]

After an "argument" in the launchbox discord, i did some googlefu and found out that dosbox daum has the option to mount zip files.

@Zombeaver promptly tested if it worked properly and surprisingly it does

So here is a guide on how to run zipped DOS-Games.

1. Download DOSBOX Daum from http://ykhwong.x-y.net
2. Unzip (DOSBOX Daum, not yourself)
3. Make 2 folders in the unpacked dosbox named "Data" and "Games"
4. Copy your Games in .ZIP format into the games folder
5. Start dosbox and type: "mount c Data:Games\YOURGAME.ZIP:/" replace YOURGAME.ZIP with your zipped game name, i'll use LBA.zip (little big adventure) here:
6. Start your game as usual: 
7. Success

You'll have to keep your isos in a seperate folder if you have to mount them for games that need them (Daggerfall, Little Big Adventure, etc.) and there are probably a few other problems and glitches but so far it works pretty good.

Edited February 22, 2017 by Izegod

[Zombeaver]

It seems to mostly work, although some things are still giving me trouble. Daggerfall, in particular, is being problematic. I was finally able to get it booted up with zips for the game install (Dagger.zip) and the cd (DFCD.zip).

However, shortly afterwards it crashed...

Using the exact same files/commands but with normal folders doesn't crash so something is odd there.

Some stuff seems to work fine though. I was playing Quake, saving, loading - continuing from one level to another - it seemed fine.

I also can't quite seem to get mounting of subdirectories within zips to work yet. Based on this page I would have thought that it would just be a format of

Mount C "Path\To\Zip\game.zip:/subdirectory"

but when I do that it completely erases everything in the zip 

[Zombeaver]

I got Duke Nukem 3D to work with some finagling. I started with just a standalone .iso and, of course, I happened to be on an office computer that doesn't have any virtual drive software. You can of course just imgmount the iso in DOSBox like normal, no problem, but I wanted to test it archived so I mounted it, installed, zipped the installed folder into Duke3D.zip and then created a temp folder and mounted it as C: so I could imgmount the .iso and then "copy *.* C:\" to extract the contents of the CD into it (normally I'd just do this with DT but... office PC). I then took the extracted CD contents folder, zipped it as Duke3DCD.zip and mounted everything from scratch in Dosbox:

Mount C "C:\Dosbox\Games\Duke3D.zip"

Mount D "C:\Dosbox\Games\Duke3DCD.zip" -t cdrom

C:

cd Duke3D

Duke3D

Voila 

Saving and loading worked as well.

It's neat as a proof of concept if nothing else.

[SentaiBrad]

I like that, "Argument". My only point was, there was nothing that I natively knew that would work from a zip. The nature of DOS just makes that hard. Multiple exe's and bats, needing to run setups to get configs and settings in place. Hell, I didn't even know Daum could run games from a zip! That is awesome. So yea, it's doable (obviously), but I worry about the success rate. Has anyone tried a game that needs a custom conf file?

[Zombeaver]

.confs, in general, will still work but the issue is that the paths would have to be updated since you're now directing it to a zip rather than a folder. LB is kindof unique in that it injects paths into the .conf based on the file paths of what you import for a LB library entry. I think for this to work in LB you'd actually need to leave those paths blank in a LB entry and then manually add the paths and commands (like I list in the above post) into custom .confs. The rest of the .conf settings would be normal.