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First post, by JimLarimore

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I have recently been going through and archiving all of my old diskettes. I was writing batch files to properly imgmount all of the disks to get them lined up for installation. But, I am running into a problem where some of these games with massive disk counts are problematic because I am exceeding the 128 character command limit in my batch files. I was hoping to using the caret symbol in my batch files to indicate continuation. But, DOSBox does not seem to understand this continuation symbol. I assume that there must be a solution to this problem as surely folks would be hitting this limit for other reasons. How do I exceed the command character limit? Or, can I add disks to the imgmount queue through multiple commands?

-Jim

Reply 1 of 6, by krcroft

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Jim,
I see the dilemma: even if you're frugal with your floppy image filenames (1.img, 2.img, ... ) you are limited to mounting 16 floppies (that you can "flip" between with Ctrl + F4) before hitting the 128-character line limit.

In python ..

9 + (128 - len('imgmount a -t floppy') - 9 * len(' N.img')) / len(' NN.img') = 16

You could use letters (a.img, b.img, ... z.img) to squeeze in an additional 3 floppies.

If you drop the .img extension and name your images (1, 2, 3, ... ) you can mount 39 floppies. Maybe that's enough?

9 + (128 - len('imgmount a -t floppy') - 9 * len(' N')) / len(' NN') = 39

Reply 2 of 6, by JimLarimore

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krcroft, thank you for the response. I did think of this short file name work-a-round. I guess I was hoping there was a more elegant solution because I want to maintain some level of reasonable naming conventions for these disks.

Reply 3 of 6, by krcroft

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The DOSBox developers do support updates to accommodate proper installation of games.

If DOSBox's command line length prevents installation of a particular game (assuming reasonably named image files in 8.3 notation), then I think it would be fair to call the limitation a bug.

To present as examples, what are some games and their quantity of floppy disks that you're dealing with?

Reply 4 of 6, by dreamer_

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Hmm, I did small test and can't hit 128 character limit (neither in command nor batch file) - at least not with `echo` …

JimLarimore, can you show us the command you have problem with? And how do you invoke your batch file?

| ← Ceci n'est pas une pipe
dosbox-staging

Reply 5 of 6, by JimLarimore

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Apologies. This bug was reported by my dad who is archiving these disks. I just tried it out myself with police quest 4 (12 disks) and I wrote a command that had to be around 250 characters and it worked fine. I'm not sure what he ran into. But, if there is a character limit, it's a lot higher than we thought.

Reply 6 of 6, by krcroft

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Glad you're all set Jim. Awesome to hear you and your dad are into the classics together.

Separate from the archiving task, there are some handy install-helpers specifically for old Sierra games here (for Windows): http://sierrahelp.com/Patches-Updates/NewSier … Installers.html