The word "DosBox" is not trademarked, at least according to the US Patent and Trademark office's on-line records.

NewRisingSun wrote:

The word "DosBox" is not trademarked, at least according to the US Patent and Trademark office's on-line records.

Neither was "MAME" at the time...Hence, the problem.

See here, as well as the rest of the site 😀, for some of the details:
http://mamedev.com/trademark.html

-Trebor

Have you guys considered trademarking this program?

we've always considered the name dosbox to be slang. (as quite some people think you mean a dos prompt in xp when you talking about a dosbox.) So the issue of trademarking has never crossed our mind.

Qbix wrote:

we've always considered the name dosbox to be slang. (as quite some people think you mean a dos prompt in xp when you talking about a dosbox.) So the issue of trademarking has never crossed our mind.

I forget. Did Win95 have the option to or 'Go to a DOSBox'? Or was that just "Boot into DOS mode" when you would request a restart?

Anyhow, the funny and/or coincidential thing happens to be a thread currently on the MAME Serious Forums concerning the whole Defender II/Stargate label. Apparently, Williams wanted to ensure the game was their property/copyright and after the manufacturing of Stargate arcade machine had the name changed to Defender II.

Some systems (IE Atari 2600) had the same game with two different labels, while some only had Defender II (NES). All of the recent (90's and newer) compilations use the name Defender II; Including the Midway's Arcade Collections - Which appears they have 'changed' the game's original title screen from Stargate to Defender II. If interested, see the 'TRIVIA' section in the following link:

http://www.mameworld.net/maws/set/stargate

Getting back on track 😁 , the whole MAME name copyright issue was a big fiasco. Lawyers had to become involved, and then there was the official submission of the copyright/trademark. It was not fun or cheap to say the least 😒

It may not be an issue now (Or ever be) for this project. However, I'm just trying to be helpful, and prevent any legal complications/headaches down the road. If the name of this project is not that important, than I guess the point is moot. However, if the "DOSBox" name is important to the developers, just letting you know that as my original post stated, this is the first time I came across an actual commerical product with the same title as this project. Furthermore, I would not like to see a 'cease or desist' be placed upon this project, or some commercial entity to claim rights to this project 😠

-Trebor

Windows has always referred to it as an MS-DOS Prompt, Command Prompt, or MS-DOS shell I think (never "DOSBox"). In Win9x you could run DOS programs in 3 ways:
- Run them from inside Windows in a preemptively-multitasked DOS shell session (worked fairly well actually; I used to play Daggerfall from Win95 on a 120MHz 486 w/16MB RAM)
- Set Windows to unload itself and run the game from "pure" DOS, then reload Windows when it exits (don't remember if rebooting is involved)
- Boot manually into pure DOS mode and run the game from there, then manually load or reboot back to Windows

I only really used the first and last ways myself.