DosFreak wrote:In DosBox Hitman~2 is interepreted from "Hitman 2 silent Assassin" and Hitman~1 is from "Hitman Codename 47".
Whereas in Windows, Windows interprets Hitman~1 as "Hitman 2 Silent Assassin" and Hitman~2 as "Hitman - Codename 47"
This is because if you look at the folders in Windows Explorer and sort by "Name" Windows places "Hitman 2" before "Hitman - Codename 47" whereas DosBox does the opposite".
Windows doesn't create 8.3 names by alphabet. It creates them when the files/dirs are created and if an 8.3 name with an ~1 already exists and after that ~2 is used and so on. AFAIK a longe hex-number comes after ~9.
DosFreak wrote:To do so SDL would have to interpret each host OS's handling of Long file names and if it were implemented it would have to be across all platforms.....
That's why DOSBox creates its own 8.3 names. Not every filesystem has 8.3-names, either.
LFN-support works only with programs that make use of the LFN-API like MS-DOS-Editor (since Win95), FreeDOS-Editor, MPXPLayer and copy, dir, del etc. (since Win95)
Other programs can't use it. And they are not prepared to work with longer filenames.
There's an open-source LFN-driver for DOS. If someone has the time to do it and wants to implement LFN support in DOSBox, he can use parts of the code to implement the API in DOSBox.
LFNDOS was originally programmed by Henrik Haftman, but Jason Hood maintains it at the moment.
DOSLFN (latest version by Jason Hood)
I think messing around with orignal-filenames is nonsense, because DOSBox has its own FS in a sandbox.