Apply Patch

[C Tadeu C Rodrigues]

How to apply a DOS game patch in an installed program since windows10 only rolls 64 bits?

[dragon57]

Use DosBox?

[Zombeaver]

What is it your trying to do specifically? For what game?

Do you know how to use DOSBox?

[C Tadeu C Rodrigues]

I used LauchBox to install a game from the time of windows3.1, The Conquest os the world. I've been saving the original game and the Patch. I was able to install the game, but when I try to install Patch in the direct in the game directory, windows10 did not allow because of 64bit. I would like to know if you have how to install the Patch through the LaunchBox.

[Zombeaver]

Launchbox doesn't really install anything for you; you're just directing it to a file.  Some DOS games you can simply import into LB, indicate they're DOS games, and start them up and it'll work, but often you can't. I install all of my DOS games though DOSBox prior to importing them into LB, as this ensures everything is setup properly beforehand.

Assuming you mean Conquest of the New World, it's a DOS game, not 3.1 (though the Deluxe Edition apparently had a W95 port). The Deluxe Edition is available for DOS as well.

I'm using a disc image of it, as an example. If you have a physical disc, that's fine too. I like to keep mine in the folder where I install the game, in a subfolder named "Disc Image":

First you need to start up DOSBox and mount your drives.

First, mount the location where you want to install the game. I want to install the game to the folder where I keep all of my DOS games, which is X:\Emulation\DOS\ I've created a folder there beforehand named after the game title, so for me I'll type:

mount c "X:\Emulation\DOS\Conquest of the New World"

Now I need to mount the disc image. I use a virtual drive (Daemon Tools, it's my "H:" drive) so I'm going to mount that drive with my image and then mount it in DOSBox, but if you don't have a virtual drive you can mount the image directly.

mount d "h:\" -t cdrom

or

imgmount d "[path\to\your\iso]" -t iso

Now we need to navigate to our "D:" drive which we've mounted.

D:

Now we need to see what all files are in there.

dir /p

This will show us a pausing list of all the files on the disc. In this case, we want to use the install.exe.

install

Choose "full installation"

Select C as the drive to install to. Back the directory to install into all the way back to C:\ (it's not actually installing it onto your real C: drive, it's installing it wherever you specified, which it sees as your C: drive)

Hold down CTRL and press F12 until your cycles (listed at the top of the DOSBox window) are about 250000 to speed up the install process.

You can either have it auto-detect the sound card settings or specify them yourself. In this case, I'm just going to use Sound Blaster. Test them out afterwards to make sure it's working.

Go to exit and select to save changes.

Now you can close out of DOSBox and import it into LB. Just drag the entire "Conquest of the New World" folder in, indicate that it's a DOS game, select "Use the files in their current location", scrape for metadata, make sure the "attempt to automatically mount ISO or CUE files as CD-Rom Drive D (recommended)" box is checked (it is by default), and then ensure that "Conquest.bat" is the "Startup file".

And now you're good to go!
DOS games will often require you to create custom configs for them in order for them to run ideally (specifying custom cycles, output type, machine type, etc.) but this one seems to work pretty well with auto cycles and other settings that I use as a default. If you want to create a custom config, edit the game in Launchbox, go to the DOSBox tab, and in the custom dosbox configuration file field, click the "Create..." button.

If you want to install a patch on top of an existing game, the process is the same, you'd just need to have installed the game, and then instead of starting the game you'd start the patch .exe and complete the setup process. That said, if you have a Windows version patch that you're trying to install onto a DOS version of the game, it's not going to work. The patch would need to be DOS-based as well.

Now, you can install an instance of Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 into DOSBox, but that's a whole other can of worms that I don't want to get into here. There are tutorials on how to do it though. 3.1 isn't too bad to do - 95 is a good deal more complicated.

[C Tadeu C Rodrigues]

The only thing I can say is thank you very much for your help.