Hmm, I guess to people who aren't used to DOS and don't mind have filenames that are really long for their files or folders the 8.3 "limitation" would be frustrating.

Think about it....

"Wedding pictures taken 8-23-1954 with camera by brothers sisters aunts cousin the day after christmas"

or

"PICS\1954\Wedding"

Which is better.....while I could arrogantly say the second method is better most people are lazy and don't know how to organize their data.

This is only going to get worse as metadata takes over and people won't have any control on organization of their files. I think I remember an article where an MS dev stated that they are going to slowly over time get to a point where you won't have to worry about organizing your files and the OS will "just take care of it".

I shudder at the thought.....considering that it would be an MS OS that would be taking care of it....

And those long folder and filenames are on the CD they want to use in DOSBox?

MiniMax wrote:

And those long folder and filenames are on the CD they want to use in DOSBox?

And that is the puzzling part. What old DOS game is going to have files and/or folders that don't hold to the 8.3 convention?

MiniMax wrote:

Somebody please tell me what the problem is with the 8.3 notation, because I simply don't see it 😕

Today's people just don't know about it.

wd wrote:

Too bad, then you got no use for dosbox anyways.

😁

wd wrote:

an remark on this "8+3 style" shortening of volume names

Never used dos?

Too long, I'd guess.

I was still using Win 3.1 in 1999.

Since about a month ago, I still used Win98Se.

The only problem with the 8+3 notation I have is the *shortening* of names (file names, volume names etc.). Nothing else.

And by the way - I really found using more than 8+3 characters/letters for a file name simply convenient - it just makes things easier. I don't have to guess anymore what I meant when I invented a filename like newtxt24v2.txt

I know - in this example, that I had written a text, but not which one. And trying to put longer titles of my own short storeies into filenames isn't easy as well.

The only quite applicable solution I've seen of this "dilemma" is the use of descriptive names in WordPefect 6.0a.

collector wrote:

MiniMax wrote:

And those long folder and filenames are on the CD they want to use in DOSBox?

And that is the puzzling part. What old DOS game is going to have files and/or folders that don't hold to the 8.3 convention?

Well, CD-ROM names an be as long as 11 characters in one go.

But DOSBOX - and Win95, by the way - tends to shortt these names into something.

Well, as long as you can access the ~ sign, this is no problem.
But under MacOS X this sign isn't printed on any of the keys - which led me at first to the conclusion that this sign doesn't exist under MacOS X at all !

Only later I found out of the alt + n key combination, and only here in the forum I learned about alt + ctrl + + - which funningly produces right now here this sign : ±

Only today I found out that one can acrtually type the long volume name under DOSBOX - regardless of its shortened display.

On the other hand I also found out that the parameter "cdrom" must not be in capital letters - DOSBOX didn't recognized it when I was writing it in capital letters today. (Example: mound d /volumes/volume_id -T cdrom).

is the *shortening* of names

How would you go around this then?

CD-ROM names an be as long as 11 characters

Grab some maths proggy and see what 8+3 gives. Surprise?

Yes, but filenames and directory names with the length of 11 chars is relatively seldom.

The only *regular* occurence of names with this length I've seen in my "computing career" were volume names.

This can be quite irritating to someonme who isn't aware of that (especially MacOS users might problably don't know much about names which are shortened because they are longer than 8 characters - without the extension of 3).

I don't know, but i just guess that MacOS users might wonder why (volume) names are shortened *at all*.

By the way, I found out today that the "MPC version" aka the "Multimedia Version" of Laura Bow: The Dagger of Amon Ra runs just fine under DOSBOX 0.72 with MacOS X v10.4.10 .

but filenames and directory names with the length of 11 chars is relatively seldom.

Still didn't get it, right? They are the ONLY usable thing for dos games.
No 254 char file names, no spaces in directories, only 3 char extensions.

wd wrote:

but filenames and directory names with the length of 11 chars is relatively seldom.

Still didn't get it, right? They are the ONLY usable thing for dos games.
No 254 char file names, no spaces in directories, only 3 char extensions.

Oh, THAT !

Okay, now I understand what you mean.

I actually thought it a bit the other way round, difficult to describe ...

Dunno if i'm missing the signs of sarcasm, anyways: the easiest way to
move around/execute files in dosbox is using the TAB key, as noted above.
You don't have to worry about long directories, ~ name shortening etc.

It's also useful to know that you can type a path or filename inside quotes and it will be processed correctly, even if it includes spaces.

Example:
copy "c:\dir name 1\dir name 2\long filename.txt" c:\dir3\file.txt

This will work in the mount command syntax, as well.

I think this was introduced with Windows NT and carried forward from there, but I'm no expert on DOS history!