it's were $home points

Ok, once again, we're talking about Win32 here...

What's "$home" in Win32?

1C:> set H
2HOMEDRIVE=C:
3HOMEPATH=\Documents and Settings\MiniMax
4
5C:> set U
6USERDOMAIN=MINIMAX
7USERNAME=MiniMax
8USERPROFILE=C:\Documents and Settings\MiniMax

so your home directory will be %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH% or (a little easier) %USERPROFILE%

Or mayby you have to create a real environment variable (press Windows-button + BREAK, select the "Advanced" tab, click "Environment variables") called HOME and point it to where you want it to look?

You were right the second time. It works if you manually create a variable called home.

But come on, what kind of concept is this? You don't expect every one who installs Dosbox to do it him/herself, do you? Not to mention that no Win32 user can understand that readme. How should I have known to create it?

Why don't you use the installation to change home into something that we choose or at least change the default one into something that actually exists (like homedrive)?

Please don't be angry or something. I just thing it's kind of strange.
Please consider to make such a change.

quite simple

on windows dosbox is usually started by it's shortcut
that one has the configfile in it (-conf c:\program files\dosbox-0.61\dosbox.conf)

On linux there is no concept of shortcuts. so it's for them that it's used.
there everybody has a $HOME variable.

So it's mainly for *unix/*bsd users not win32 users

The -conf shortcut is only good if you don't want to use any conf files other than the global one...which kind of ruins the entire concept of customization, isn't it?