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DOSBox Game Launcher (DOSBox Frontend)

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Reply 1140 of 1962, by rcblanke

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Hi Neville,

I think you should be able to imagemount the image as 'hdd', and then 'grab' the mount and 'browse' to your game exe file inside the image.

Reply 1142 of 1962, by Andore

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Hi guys!

I have a issue. I had DBGL installed before on my pc and was ok. After I've formated i've lost the program. I downloaded the last version (0.79) but now I have a problem.

I like to keep my things organized with pictures and everything. I remember, before, when I added a game i can see some pictures on the right of the search window. Now I cannot add pictures for games nor the wizard are finding me pictures (no more the right square when i search). I looked everywhere in the settings and I can't find nothing to relate to my problem. I also installed prev. versions of DBGL and I have the same issues. I have the last java installed, so I think java it's not a problem. Can somebody help me plsssssssssssssss. I will provide screen caps if you request. PRETTY PLEASE!

And pardon my english!

THANKS GUYS!!!!

I checked the boxes with import screens from mobygames but still can find me screens

Reply 1143 of 1962, by rcblanke

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Hi Andore,

Yes, this is a known issue (HTML changes at MobyGames). It's already fixed in the latest test build; simply download this zip archive and extract it into your existing dbgl folder, overwriting your existing dbgl.jar file. This updates DBGL to version 0.79b, in which MobyGames screenshots and coverart are working properly again.

Regards,
Ronald

Reply 1144 of 1962, by Serious Callers Only

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rcblanke, i'm wondering if you've investigated using FUSE in the linux and macosx release for 'zip' support.

It seems actually very easy. First :
sudo apt-get install squashfs-tools unionfs-fuse
get this repository and compile it:
https://github.com/vasi/squashfuse

then mksquashfs on the game dir (this can actually be part of the frontend, for example on selecting a game config, you'd be given the opportunity to compress the underlying dir and delete the original or uncompress, like in the dolphin emulator UI).

Finally to mount and unmount (none of this needs superuser, phantasmagoria is just a example, it's what i used to test):

make some dirs if they don't exist:
if(!exists(~/.dosbox/drive/)) mkdir -p ~/.dosbox/drive/
if(!exists(~/.dosbox/drive.ro/)) mkdir -p ~/.dosbox/drive.ro/

then on selecting a game entry :
if(!exists(~/.dosbox/drive.rw/phantasmagoria2/)) mkdir -p ~/.dosbox/drive.rw/phantasmagoria2/
squashfuse path_to_it/phantasmagoria2.sqsh ~/.dosbox/drive.ro/
unionfs-fuse -o cow ~/.dosbox/drive.rw/phantasmagoria2/=RW:~/.dosbox/drive.ro/=RO ~/.dosbox/drive

and finally:
dosbox ~/.dosbox/drive

The directory is mounted and writable. All writes are stored in ~/.dosbox/drive.rw/phantasmagoria2/ and the zip is untouched.
PhysFS with phantasmagoria 2 (2.2 uncompressed, 1.8 gb 7z, 1.9 gb 'squashfs' and zip), cried for mercy, had no music (...bugs..) and eventually crashed. With this scheme it's unnoticeable. And i think you can mount directories and isos inside, from a dosbox.config, no problem... which is something the physfs patch never did.
On shutdown you can umount with fusermount -u <mountpoint> but i'm unsure if this is even needed.

I think you should consider it. And if not, i should 😉 (i'm saying i'm going to try to package DBGL for my ubuntu ppa with this feature if you don't do it first). But it really should be in your upstream since this apparently works on macosx, android and BSD too.
The fuse filesystem is a bit slower than the kernel implementations but for games, which are 99% read only data, it doesn't matter one bit. squash fileformat is the major gain - besides the fact that the physFS patch is buggy - its compression seems to be much much faster to decompress while only being a few percent worse than zip.

In fact, it's so fast that i'm going to try the squash the whole of my DOS games dir at once to see if its bearable.

It's a pity that windows doesn't have pluggable filesystem support but i'm not going to let that me stop from doing this on linux.

Last edited by Serious Callers Only on 2015-07-27, 16:25. Edited 3 times in total.

Reply 1145 of 1962, by Serious Callers Only

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Also you've got a bad bug on linux: you're always using the inbuilt dosbox you package regardless of the user selecting a valid dosbox path.

It seems you want the user to select a dir only, not a file on the the filechooser. If i manually write '/usr/bin/dosbox' it complains it can't find '/usr/bin/dosbox/dosbox', fair enough. But if i write '/usr/bin/ it accepts it but silently discards my setting. The dosbox opened is not the system one and when you return to the setting it was reset!

edit: ah, i see. It's the game profile i created that got associated with it.

Reply 1146 of 1962, by Serious Callers Only

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Do you have a public source repository for DBGL rcblanke? I'm thinking of not using FUSE. Overlayfs and squashfs in the current linux kernel is much faster and doesn't need install or compile of additional libs. What they do need is root permissions.

My current plan is to make a small sanitized setuid executable to install in my ppa. squashmount_dosbox. It will check if the .sqsh file + write dir combo requested is not mounted or if something is mounted, it's the same combo, if not quit with error, unless '-f' (force) is a argument, then umount current if any and mount it. Print the mountpoint as a string if successful and return a success/failure code.
Then at runtime dbgl could test the presence of this and check that it's executable as root by itself with setuid.

Notice you can't actually distribute setuid executables without using the package manager (it has to be the right root owning it) so this needs root permissions to install the first time so that's why i'm saying i will put it in my ppa.

Then everything else can be done in the dbgl source:

when mounting a .sqsh for the first time warn the user to quit all open dosbox windows and squashmount_dosbox -f <dummywritedir> <sqsh>
analyze the mounted filesystem for dosbox.confs (is there code like this to reuse there? This is easy to do with java 7 anyway)
auto-populate game launching options from these (ditto for code reuse)
thereafter when launching a game configuration check use squashmount_dosbox to try to mount by squashmount_dosbox <writedir> <sqsh>
if it fails warn the user to close all dosbox windows and click ok when he wants to proceed (it will only fail if the <writedir> <sqsh> combo is different)
check return for actual mount point to use when launching stuff (for portability).

execute dosbox with the right conf file by running it in the right sub-directory under the mount point (the suffix after ':' in the database path for the conf file maybe?)

This solution has the advantage that future frontends and maybe other platforms (if the place it ends up is in PATH) just need to use the same strategy of looking for 'squashmount_dosbox' if they want to support the feature. Though i doubt other platforms than linux will have kernel support for overlayfs and squashfs. But they'll probably have mount with a diferent 'overlayfs' and 'squashfs' so that is just a ifdefn away i guess.

Reply 1147 of 1962, by Serious Callers Only

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Ehhhh, using setuid correctly is something i'm not too confident in. I guess it'll have to be fuse then. Maybe it can be more portable then. For values of more (BSD, linux, macosx). And i guess adding a option to update the squash file with the cache dir (overwriting files that were written to before) is not asking too much for dosbox then.

Reply 1148 of 1962, by Serious Callers Only

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Here is the general outline of the thing (warning, this is not tested, will probably crash because i haven't run it in a while and it's python, is not portable no matter what you see on the first part of main, and still is missing some critical parts, like a real hash per archive).
http://hastebin.com/qihotovico.py

The missing parts are a good hash to detect accidental modifications on mount... this probably needs a larger understanding of the squashfs format than what i have atm or a small speed sacrifice when mounting (listing files to look not deeply for modifications by feeding a file name+mod date listing to md5sum or something).
And packaged with a postinst script to alter your /etc/fstab to give mounting rights to the directories/files for the squash and the unionfs.
This will need to be done per user that needs to mount the things (because i don't think i can - or should - make things bellow /home/user/ world writable which would be a requirement for any user to mount, but at install time the user that installs the script should be sorted.

Reply 1149 of 1962, by Sheriff Hobbes

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I'm running DBGL 0.79 on Debian 8.1 (Java 1.7 U79 64-bit). The games run fine. However, any custom link I include for a profile (e.g. a manual or a secret guide), nothing happens when I click on that link.
Also, when I right-click on a game and select "open game folder" or "open captures folder", nothing happens.

Problem #1 (links) did not happen in 0.78.
Problem #2 happens in both versions.

Another thing: How can I avoid opening all links in my default web browser? That really sucks. I would like them to be opened with the associated default application, e.g. PDFs in Okular, text files in Kate and so on.

Marriage is a three ring circus:
-engagement ring
-wedding ring
-suffering

H. L. Mencken

Reply 1150 of 1962, by rcblanke

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Hi,

Serious Callers Only, while I can surely appreciate the effort you've put into writing your suggestion to incorporate FUSE/OverlayFS/SquashFS into DBGL, I will most likely not build it myself. Considering the facts that I have zero knowledge with its usage, the (seemingly) complex implementation and the very low amount of Linux DBGL users, I think my time is better spent on something else. That being said, if anybody _is_ wiling to put time into this and can write a patch, I will surely help to integrate it in DBGL.
BTW I don't use a public repository, but a private SVN server. Anyway, you can always find all the latest code in http://members.quicknet.nl/r.blankendaal/beta, in the src<version>.zip file.

Sherrif Hobbes, this sounds like a regression on your particular platform. Can you test my new build (0.79f) please, to check if its fixed?

All the latest files
To upgrade, grab the dbgl.jar as usual.

Regards,
Ronald

Reply 1151 of 1962, by Sheriff Hobbes

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Hi Ronald,

wonderful: all 3 problems are fixed with 0.79f!
- links are followed
- links are opend in the correct application
- "open game folder" and "open captures folder" opens the correct folder in Dolphin

Thanks! 😀
Will these fixes go into 0.80? When will you release the next stable version?

Later,
SH

Marriage is a three ring circus:
-engagement ring
-wedding ring
-suffering

H. L. Mencken

Reply 1152 of 1962, by kolano

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rcblanke wrote:

Serious Callers Only, while I can surely appreciate the effort you've put into writing your suggestion to incorporate FUSE/OverlayFS/SquashFS into DBGL, I will most likely not build it myself. Considering the facts that I have zero knowledge with its usage, the (seemingly) complex implementation and the very low amount of Linux DBGL users, I think my time is better spent on something else. That being said, if anybody _is_ wiling to put time into this and can write a patch, I will surely help to integrate it in DBGL.
BTW I don't use a public repository, but a private SVN server. Anyway, you can always find all the latest code in http://members.quicknet.nl/r.blankendaal/beta, in the src<version>.zip file.

Yeah, I'm not really clear the support is needed. It would seem to provide similar functionality as the pre-existing ability to mount ZIP and other compressed archives, which is supported on a wider array of platforms.

Eyecandy: Turn your computer into an expensive lava lamp.

Reply 1153 of 1962, by Gliktch

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G'day rcblanke,

Firstly thank you very much for the work and time you've put into DBGL - it's really enabled me to make things a lot easier for my nieces and nephews to enjoy the games we all loved (and get the games library looking awesome on the lounge gaming/HT PC, of course!). The main issue I'm having right now, however, is that you don't appear to have any inbuilt option for launching with a custom launcher, or executing a binary directly, and my (albeit amateur) attempts at writing a wrapper to 'trick' DBGL into working this way have failed...

Could you please, please, please, allow us to choose a specific executable with which to run the games (i.e., in the 'Locate Dosbox version' dialog), or even better, add an option to simply execute other games directly? I'd really love to set up ScummVM and Linux-native games in the same screen (with all the benefits of the ability to enter and filter by custom fields for age group, game type etc), rather than having to use your launcher for 70% and icons for the rest.

If rcblanke is too busy (or for some reason opposed) to provide this option, could anyone else help me out with how to make this work? Since 'Locate Dosbox Version' doesn't let you choose an executable, just a directory, I assume it need to be named 'dosbox' (in the Linux version).

I wrote a simple script, just:

!#/bin/bash
echo $@
sleep 5

and marked it as executable, renamed it 'dosbox' but nothing.

Tried converting it to binary with shc, still nothing.

Okay... Scratch that, I just found where I *can* do what I want to do 😀

I set my dummy dosbox version (which now does nothing but echo params to a file and exit), then add the necessary commands to Right-click Game> Edit> Custom Commands tab> Native to the Operating System> Add

Tested with a native app (Hedgewars) and it launches fine, don't see any reason why ScummVM commandlines won't as well.

Have you considered making this more obvious? Add Game Wizard> (*) DosBox Game ( ) ScummVM Game ( ) Native Game? 😉

Reply 1154 of 1962, by rcblanke

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Hi everybody,

I've get a new test build 0.79g ready with the following improvements:

* Implemented basic statistics for profiles, dosbox versions and templates such as creation time, number of starts, etc.;
* A fix for Linux and Mac systems where the automatic creation of a dosbox.conf for a newly added DOSBox version would not work (Jan Baumann);
* A workaround on Mac systems where browsing for the DOSBox executable inside a DOSBox.app wasn't very user-friendly. Now you should be able to simply point DBGL to your DOSBox.app (Jan Baumann);
* Some button size fixes for high-dpi systems;
* Major cleanup of source code layout and the translation files; reordering of translation keys and removed some unused ones;
* Update for the Polish translation (ZeroX4);
* Updated SWT to 4.5.1 and commons-lang to 3.4

All the latest files
To upgrade, update dbgl.jar in the dbgl folder, together with the new commons-lang3-3.4.jar in the dbgl/lib folder. You can remove the outdated commons-lang3-3.3.2.jar .

Regards,
Ronald

Last edited by rcblanke on 2015-10-14, 15:10. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1155 of 1962, by Neville

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I think there's a problem with latest version... in Spanish regional characters (accented vocals, etc.) are replaced by "?". I tested it using a fresh install and overwriting my older installation.

Is this happening with other languages?

Reply 1156 of 1962, by rcblanke

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Thanks for the heads up Neville, I'll have a look...

EDIT:
Ah, the wonderful world of file encodings... This was actually broken in the official release 0.79 on Mac systems as well!
But it should be fixed in this new build, please confirm. I've also added another small change; added opl3gold option to oplmode for newly supported AdLib Gold music emulation in DOSBox SVN.

All the latest files

Regards,
Ronald

Reply 1157 of 1962, by Neville

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This borders on the paranormal 😲

I have two installations of DBGL... in one I keep the games I play regularly... and the other one is for testing stuff.

I have deleted the outdated commons-langXXX.jar files and downloaded the latest one... now regional symbols are back in my testing DBGL installation, but not in the other one. Weird.