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TUTORIAL - Running ZIPPED DOS-Games via DOSBOX Daum


Ize

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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 :D

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 :D

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. :D

Edited by Izegod
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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).

unknown.png

unknown.png

However, shortly afterwards it crashed...

unknown.png

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 :/

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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 :)

58adffbbaf1f3_Duke3Dzipped.thumb.png.52dfd1ea5382689701ece7c05be718b4.pngSaving and loading worked as well.

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

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I like that, "Argument". xD 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?

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.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.

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