I remember those two programs wich were used by many game compilations in the 90's with old DOS games. The game is on CD in an installed form. The two programs work like this: They betrayal DOS the CD is an HD and every write is done in a preconfigured directory on the real HD. I think this function would be great for Unix-like Users. A DOS Program can be installed once in a systemwide folder and every user can run it with DosBox with an option where to write the changes. So there is a base installation wich isn't trouched by any user. To make an example. Game ABC is installed in /usr/games/ABC with the soundconfiguration file SND.CFG and subdir DATA. Now a user runs the game with DoxBox. He reconfigures the sound because he prefers Adlib over General Midi, does a Hex-Patch on DATA\GAME.OVR, starts the game and saves the game. Every fileread in DosBox checks the users homedirectory/ABC first and if the file can't be found ther then it searches the originally mounted path /usr/local/games/ABC. If a filewrite is done the file is firstly copied to the users homedirectory/ABC and then the change is done there. After these actions the users directory/ABC would consist of the file SND.CFG, DATA/GAME.OVR and SAVE01.SAV for example. I think also other OS would benefit from such a DosBox Function. Also for Backups so people could make a default for all writes in a directory in their "My Files" where they can backup their savegames regulary and don't have to backup their installed games as well. They also could burn them on a CD in an installed way. They could run them from there or can restore them from there in an installed way after a HD crash. The only have to copy the CD back to the same place on the HD and to restore their "My Files" to get every savegame back. I am just a beginner with java in school and i am afraid i don't have the skills to code such a thing in C. I want to change from my win98 to some Unix in the future and my dream is this function for DosBox and for Wine (wich i haven't used yet in contrast to DoxBox where all my old gameclassix run on). I hope you like my suggestion.
Regards,
Andreas