Problems with DOSBOX in Launchbox (preinstalled games)

[Javier Ramos Fariña]

Greetings lovers of emulation and preservation of the retro. In the last two years I have been creating a fairly extensive and careful library of games in Launchbox. I am having some problems to get my selection of games in MSDOS to load directly through the DOSBOX included in Launchbox. Practically all the games I am trying to use are preinstalled. They already come with an executable (.exe) that makes the game start directly without installation or the use of commands in DOS. While this executable works perfectly for me outside of Launchbox, I am unable to add the game to this library and have it run correctly. I have almost twenty games and I only get half of them to work. If the game has any translation patch, or to skip the famous protections of the time, I only get them to start in native mode ignoring those patches. Can anyone help me? I’ve been having this problem for a long time but I can’t find much information on the web. Thank you in advance!!!

[elwooha6]

If the executable loads fine by itself why do you want to use DosBox to load it? You could add the games to Launchbox as standalone executables if that is the case.

EDIT:

Revisiting this since I wasn't really that helpful. For Dos games that are preinstalled I archive them and load them in RetroArch with the DosBox Pure core. It's very well designed and allows you to set a default executable for each title so when you launch it from Launchbox it will prompt you which exe to run and then it should load that one by default every time after that. I've even had good luck installing Windows 98 in this core and running old Win9x games that way.

As far as translations go I don't have any experience there but hopefully someone will notice this that can help with that.

Edited December 22, 2024 by elwooha6