yes, there is no way 🙁

Shame.

I was wanting to test some stuff.

So download VPC2004/2007 and test some stuff.

Shame.

No.

DosFreak wrote:

So download VPC2004/2007 and test some stuff.

Sure.

Um, what good would that (using VPC) do?

I wanted to compare some game behavior under Dosbox's built-in shell vs. Ms-Dos.

Compare what?

Some games which have specific issues in Dosbox. For instance The 7th Guest's install program failing to find the CD (real or image). I suspected it may be caused by the install program finding the Z drive.

I was hoping to be able to boot to Ms-Dos and mount the CD there, but I see that isn't possible. I suppose I could do a custom build of Dosbox to test it some other way, but I was hoping for a quicker/easier way. I don't have as much free time to tinker with it as I'd like.

7th guest works fine for me, maybe post your system specs/mountings and stuff.

The game works fine...if I copy over files from the CD manually.

If you actually try to run the installer on CD#2 however, it will always claim the CD is not present. It does this whether I use a real disc or an image.

I'm running Vista on a 2.8Ghz dual core with 4GB ram. I've read that Vista has issues with low level cd support, but because it has the same behavior with an image I don't think that's it.

I've seen games (especially early win95 games) which freak out if the CD drive isn't the last drive on the system, or if there are more than one CD drive present. I suspected this might be similar and the installer would likely work if it couldn't see the Z drive.

I just wanted to test my hypothesis.

Create a cue/bin pair, mount the cue file (if you didn't already), and be sure
you mount the cdrom as d: in dosbox.

I'm creating bin/cue's for all my DOS games (about 150 discs so far). 😀

I mounted a folder c:\games as 'C' in Dosbox.
I mounted the cue's for the two game discs as drive 'D'.

I can read the CD's fine and if I copy the game files over to a new directory on 'C' I can run the game just fine (even the CD audio works). I've actually completed the entire game under Dosbox, so I know that part is ok.

I'm just curious why the installer fails.

(Edit: There is one tiny issue with playing the game although not really a Dosbox issue per se: The midi music tends to blast over top of the voices. Setting the various volume levels in Dosbox doesn't help as the game appears to reset them when it starts. It might be nice to be able to adjust the various sound levels outside of the command line interface, but this is neither here nor there.)

When exactly does it say that it can't find the cd?

I go to drive D and type install. After that the install program puts up a blue dialog that says "This program will copy files to your hard drive"...blah blah..."PRESS ANY KEY TO CONTINUE."
After pressing a key I get a red dialog titled " ! Warning !" which says the second CD of The 7th Guest is not present. It then gives an option to retry. Retrying never works and I usually end up hitting escape at that point to exit back to dos.

I don't remember the exact steps of the installation, but what does it do
if you start the installer from the first cd? If it asks for the second cd later
on then be sure you update the drive cache (ctrl-f4).

I just tried it...I never bothered before because I knew the installer was on disc 2.

Typing install when disc1 is in results in a message that the installer is now on disc two due to space issues. It then drops back to a command line.

I then hit ctrl-f4 to switch to disc 2 and type install, yielding the same results as before.

I know my disc image is good. I tried burning it back to a CD-R and running the install under vista. It detects the disc just fine and the install proceeds normally.

Just tried, works fine for me (installer is on cd2 as you said).
Maybe get some debugger-enabled dosbox build and see what
mscdex calls they do (they are rather sparse for me and the
cdrom detection works fine), int2f ah=15

I had read at least one thread which described the same symptoms I'm seeing, which is what led me to believe it was a universal problem.

I seem to be having the same issue as seen in the later part of this thread: having problems loading the 7th guest

I tried copying the files and mounting them as in the last post there and it works for me too, although I couldn't say why. That's an ugly workaround at best.

wd, Are you using a real CD or an image file, or a mounted directory?

There have been a number of threads about this problem installing The 7th Guest in DOSBox, such as this one: 7th Guest and 11th Hour setups beyond the install

It seems the earliest releases of the CD had no issues with installing in DOSBox, but some later releases do. The update called T7GFIX3.ZIP contains an INSTALL.EXE that causes the error with my CDs, even though the original one works fine.

Following up on your idea that the Z: drive is causing some confusion, I used a debug version of DOSBox to log file operations.

Log with the original (working) INSTALL.EXE:

1  10863723: FILES:file open command 0 file install.EXE
2  12892577: FILES:file open command 0 file groovie.ini
3  12893217: FILES:file open command 0 file \t7g\install\hdisk.gjd
4  12893640: FILES:file open command 0 file \t7g\install\hdisk.gjd
5  12896343: FILES:file open command 0 file \t7g\install\hdisk.gjd

Log with the updated (problematic) INSTALL.EXE:

1  14737795: FILES:file open command 0 file install.EXE
2  15440432: FILES:file open command 0 file audio.dat
3  17376758: FILES:file open command 0 file groovie.ini
4  17377729: FILES:file open command 0 file C:\t7g\install\hdisk.gjd
5  17384188: FILES:file open command 0 file Z:\t7g\install\hdisk.gjd

The installer looks for GROOVIE.INI (and AUDIO.DAT in the update) to determine if it's being run as a first-time install, or from an existing installation where only the sound system needs to be configured. The important thing appears to be how it's looking for the HDISK.GJD install file. The original EXE looks for it on the current drive (D: in this case), but the update EXE is looking on C: and Z: but not D: as it should. I can only guess that it's looking on Z: because it's the highest drive letter in the system. Anyway, I'm guessing the update (which includes some additional audio support) was included with CDs released later, and those CDs are the ones people are having problems with.