hey, that sounds nice. ill take a look on it tomorrow.

i spent the whole day on optimizing the compatiblity to dosbox 0.65. db-starter now has support for the different rendering engines (they can be found in the experts settings) and the programme checks if the dosbox version is 0.65 to handle it differently. the online update is also ready.

i'll release dosbox-starter 1.6 in a few days, so stay tuned 😉

THANKS, moejoe and WELCOME TO THE FORUM.

Version 1.6 will be released tomorrow on my website.have fun, and give me feedback 😉

hm.... 🤣 any comments?

heh. Most of us can only read English?

tried to test it, but it needs an installer (which I hate), the installer needs admin rights because it tries to put some dlls into the Windows System folder and tries to assign its database extension. Of course it failed miserabley on starting the app (because I didn't gave the installer admin rights). This is just me, I like to take a piss out of admin requiring programs 😀
The screenshot looks very nice, though.
I'll try again (with admin rights) when I'm not feeling so evil 😀

hmm well its the first frontend ive ever tryed (you can call me frontend virgin if you want hehe) so dont blame me.
the installer is nice and comfortable, the GUI is also very user-friendly.
but i think its to simple for me. iam missing many useful settings like scalers, cycles=auto/max and some newer CVS features...
and how can i mount subfolders on the drive settings? i have no clue...
i also have some graphic errors (winxp) on the expert tap(check the screenshot below).

Hi and welcome,

A new frontend, oh my..., the competition is getting hard on me. 😉

A few pointers I learned along the way developing D.O.G.
- Translations, people like to have their own language in front of them.
- Don't do it with tabs or huge cluttered windows, I did it once and threw it completely in the trash. It was not even manageable from a programmers point of view or for the user for that matter. If I had kept D.O.G. with tabs, then it would currently hold about 32 tabs 😵 .
- Looking at it I see that you can only mount real drives and not directories or whatever that a user floats his boat. I would recommend adding a "Select Directory" to the list of drives.
- Standerdize, keep it as simple and repetative as possible. If a sollution is already presented by Windows, like autocompletion or any other thing, then try to mimic it. Users tend to miss some neat features ,that would lessen their troubles, if they are non "Windows" standard.
- Make it able to use templates, so that people can quickly load and create a new profile.
- There are other DOSBox flavors out there that people tend to use, and these don't always have their names set to 'DOSBox.exe'.

While I was running the application everything worked, except the update feature. I downloaded the app, installed, pressed the update button and it crashed after downloading a package.

The Assistent is a good addition, clean and simple. I like it.

Thanks for the addition to the frontend experiance.

Erik.

hm, this broken screenshot is strange, but i have a clue why it could happen.

ErikGG, tahnks for all the advice. A multilingual version is planned, and get holidays tomorrow, so there's enough time for coding. And well, i already though about a listview or something instead of the tabs, but when i use a listview in VisualBasic, i have to include the common controls which are over 1 MB in size. i don't like the idea that a program like this uses this library.
about the thing of mounting dirs: i'll think about it, but it wasn't neccessary for me yet.

btw: You can edit the path and the file name of dosbox easily. i just used a "drive tree" for searching the dosbox directory because this is not as confusing as a "select file" dialog. stupid users (*g*) may not know which exe file they have to start, so the standard exe name is dosbox.exe, but you can change it to foobar.exe or whatever 😁

edit: currently, there is no update available for dosbox-starter. it should say that you already have the latest version.

Oh, just remembered that I had that problem once too with D.O.G., the black canvas thingy.

It was a problem with Windows XP themes and using a listview and supporting transparent items. I fixed it by blocking off a message, but enabeling it under Windows 2000.

But under Visual Basic it changes the whole thing, as it is an interpreter and all objects are "Use it or lose it", unable to change their inner workings.

Maybe, SysGOD had an already installed version of the runtime package. But your installer forgot to update them to a newer version. OR, your supplied runtime package isn't XP themes compatible and overwrote the XP compatible runtime edition of SysGOD.

Hope this helps,

Erik.

Hm, the msvbvm60.dll - which is the runtime library - works for me with windows xp. i don't know the reason of the black areas, maybe it has something to do with the enabled "xp-style"? visual basic normally uses the win2k style, even if you are in windows xp with xp style on. i patched this with a XML resource which uses the common controls. i think i had seen this before, it maybe really has something to do with the Xp style.

Yup, it is the themes/XP style that causes the problem. When I had the problem, it only occured when I included the XP manifest, to use the new ComCtrls v6. I would recommend to search a runtime library that is specially designed for XP with manifest.

D.O.G. is designed with Delphi so I don't have the limitation of not being able to rewrite the controls.

Rewriting the used components/objects fixed the problem for me.

Erik.

indeed i can confirm the xp-style problem. it was gone when i changed back to the standard luna style.

i hope you get it solved and both of you, keep up the good work! 😉

Hm... This didn't happen to me yet, not with the win2k style, neither with luna. that's really strange.