You can easily do this yourself by just dropping a Windows shortcut to DOSBox in your "SendTo" folder in your user folder.

tried that, doesn't work. Doesn't act any differently than just starting it up normally. No path change whatsoever & I do have the drives mounted in DOSBox the same as they are in windows.

that works but I'd like it to launch my config file, this way it does all the mounts, plus I'd also like it to go to the path from the C:\, not mount the path as the root.

Basically, I'd like it set up just like the microsoft dos emulator. Any chance of that?

Not by us....

forget the implementing into windows end, let's just talk about DOSBox. Is there a way for it to launch the dosbox.config & then change the path to whatever is entered into it via the command line it's launched from?

W h a t ?

ok, lets say I want dosbox to go to "C:\Gaming". It automounts "C:\" to "C:" in the dosbox.conf, how do I get it to switch to "C:\Gaming" from the comand line? Just " dosbox "C:\Gaming" " ?

Line 218 in the ReadMe linked in my signature:
http://dosbox.cvs.sourceforge.net/dosbox/dosb … DME?view=markup

1218   -c command
2219         Runs the specified command before running "name". Multiple commands
3220         can be specified. Each command should start with "-c", though.
4221         A command can be: an Internal Program, a DOS command or an executable 
5222         on a mounted drive.

I mean - you did read the ReadMe, didn't you?

heh. Line 218. Classic!

no need to be rude. yes I read the readme & no matter what I try, I can't mount all the drives & have DOSBox switch to whatever folder is selected. I've been bouncing this around for hours. The last thing I tried was...

"C:\Gaming\Emulation and Roms\DOSBox\DOSBox.exe" -noconsole -c "mount c: c:\" -c "mount d: d:\" -c "c:" -c "cd "%1""

in the registry, works the same as when I tried

"C:\Gaming\Emulation and Roms\DOSBox\DOSBox.exe" "%l" -noconsole -conf "C:\Gaming\Emulation and ROMs\DOSBox\dosbox.conf"

& I also tried replacing %L with %1 - nothing works. I can't get all drives mounted & have dosbox switch to the selected folder.

If you insist on mounting the complete, real, Windows C-drive as the virtual C-drive in DOSBox (the mount C "C:\" stuff), then I am not going to help you. Sorry.

marker, you seem to go on a wrong way with Dosbox.
A very productive way to go about playing games with Dosbox is to use either a frontend and let that worry about stuff or go the more dos style way (old school way for people with their third teeth):
put all games in a nice folder like C:\Dosgames (so GameXYZ is in c:\Dosgames\GameXYZ). Now put little batch files into C:\dosgames that point to the game exe as if c:\dosgames were c:\ and if needed add lines before the pointer to the exe to specify needed stuff like cores (example c:\Dosgames\gamexyz.bat with the entries
core=dynamic
cd gamexyz
gamexyz.exe)
Now start dosbox and mount (you can add this to the autoexec section of dosbox.conf)
mount c C:\Dosgames
mount d d:\ -t cdrom (if d:\ is your CD-Rom drive)
c:

and if you want to start gamexyz type
gamexyz

Mounting your whole c:\ drive is a waste of energy and only forces you to deal with long file/folder names (a possible source of your above problems).

I'm not mounting all the hard drives for gaming purposes, I do it for development. For games, I mount the game folder itself as L:\ then have DOSBox launch the game from there.

I've been using DOS since the 3.20 days (around 1987) & sometimes, an old sk00l3r just likes to do things the old fashioned way. I like the user friendability that the MS "command here" powertoy adds to Windows, however, the MS emulator lacks in areas where DOSBox obviously surpasses, not only in performance of games but just... DOS.

I'd just much prefer using DOSBox over the MS-DOS emulator, however, I don't want to be restricted to not being able to go to parent folders (i.e. using the existing "Open DOSBox here") & I'm not going to want to manually change over to whatever sub-folder (starting up DOSBox launching the dosbox.conf).

Look, I'm not trying to be a pain in the ass, I'd just like to be able to have the best of both worlds. If no one can figure out how to do it then fine, thank you for your time. Eventually, I will figure it out. I was just hoping someone could lend a helping hand.

Either way, thanks for your time.

I'm still not getting it. Really. For whatever purpose, why does it need to go beyond specific borders? For games the above is good, if you want for edevlopment, I highly doubt that you need to go beyond certain folders (or if you do it seems like a messy directory structure - no ill attended). So two conf files might be good, one for games (games.conf) that you only use when you want to play games along with a shortcut that uses that conf. And for your development use the normal dosbox.conf and then go down to where you want or figure the above problems out (I still think the problem lies with long file names that Dosbox can't use "inside" (you can mount a long file name path but you can't cd to one in a munted folder unless you use the short dos name)),
To me it seems you are over complicating things with your powertoys like wish.

For games, I have a conf file for each game. I have a batch file that I use for launching DOSBox. The batch file verifies that the conf file exists, then launches DOSBox, for some of the games, such as syndicate wars, I use a duplicate DOSBox.exe named SYNWARS.exe so my controller software knows to load the keyboard to joystick mappings for that game, blah blah blah.

For development, there are certain things easier in DOS. Renaming a group of files at once, checking to see what the DOS name of a long name folder is (easiest in DOSBox on this one), etc; etc. I do all kinds of stuff & I never know what it is I might get into next, so I like having options. I like to be prepared to be able to do something at the drop of a hat & I hate restrictions. Who likes them?

I just don't understand what's so complicated about launching the default config & going into whatever selected folder automatically. if you understand why people use the "command here" option at all, then you would understand why I would like this installed. It's the same as anything else out there but better - that's it.

Use this registry key:

1Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
2
3[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\Directory\shell\dosbox\command]
4@="C:\\LocalTools\\Open_DOSBox_here.cmd %L"

with this CMD-file:

1@echo	off
2
3	call :name83 "%*"
4
5	cd "%TEMP%"
6
7	start "DOSBox 0.65" %ProgramFiles%\DOSBox-0.65\dosbox.exe -noconsole -c "mount C C:\" -c "mount D D:\" -c "C:" -c "chdir %name83%"
8
9:name83
10	set MeansDirectory=Katalog
11
12	pushd "%~1"
13
14	for /f "skip=3 tokens=1-3" %%I in ('COMMAND.COM /C DIR') do (
15	    if %%I==%MeansDirectory% (
16		set name83=%%K
17		goto unpushd
18	    )
19	)
20
21:unpushd
22	popd
23	goto :EOF

But don't come screaming here when you have blown away your disk.

You will of course need to adjust the path C:\LocalTools used in the registry key to match the path to where you save the CMD-file.

And, in the CMD-file, adjust the word Katalog to match the word that COMMAND.COM displays in the heading when it executes the DIR command.

Edit: It would have been a lot easier if the magic %L used in the registry had a counterpart that represented the short 8.3 name.

😮 The mind boggles.

I'm working on 3 comps atm but I will try this later. Thank you for your help.

MiniMax
But don't come screaming here when you have blown away your disk.

What are you talking about? DOSBox can damage my system?