The star at the end is a bit odd.

Agreed, im not sure if the program is trying to create a file with a wildcard? slightly confused myself, like I said, I believe it takes the 2 toollibrary files, makes temporary files for editing purposes, this is where it fails, and then upon exiting the tool editor, it saves the temp files over the originals and deletes them, if anyone has any insight into how to get this to work, it would be greatly appreciated, there is no newer software available to us as the company stopped updating it, and we are kind of at a loss. I can supply you with a copy of the program for testing if it would help.

DOSBox is intended for games, not applications. Some applications work well enough, but that is mostly the luck of the draw -- there are numerous shortcuts and half-measures in DOSBox's DOS emulation because they're good enough for games. That said, your app is apparently trying to create files with wildcards, but that would fail in real DOS as well. So, ignoring that warning, what exactly isn't working from the observed behavior of the program running in DOSBox?

its a tool library editor for the main portion of the software, and in DOSBox that one part of the software will not run, when i try to launch it i get that error, and the software states "OPEN error : \alphapls\worklib.TL1" and I know that DOSBox is intended for games, not applications, but I really have no other choice, outside of having a standalone computer running 32bit xp for running this software, if I could get an updated version of the software I would, but this is the only software I can use to run a CNC lathe here at my shop, and the company stopped updating the software, I would gladly pay for anything else I could use to program this machine. on a windows 2000 laptop the software does run with no issues, so somehow the command being executed to create these temp files does work, but is throwing me for a loop in DOSBox, as I said, I can supply a copy of the software to anyone willing to take a look, and would happily donate to the DOSbox group if you thought this issue could be solved.

The program runs a wildcard copy through the command shell: COPY ATOOLIB.TL* WORKLIB.TL*

The COPY command in DOSBox's shell does not handle wildcarded renaming of copied files. REN also doesn't handle wildcarded renaming. I think there may be some batchfile-based game install systems that use the feature, but it's generally not needed by games.

You have several options to work around the issue:

1) Copy the files individually, perhaps with a batch file like:
COPY ATOOLIB.TL1 WORKLIB.TL1
COPY ATOOLIB.TL2 WORKLIB.TL2
ATOOLS

2) Use the 4DOS shell, which supports wildcarded renaming while copying. Note that you'll have to change the COMSPEC environment variable to do this, for example: SET COMSPEC=C:\4DOS.COM

3) Use the Daum SVN build because it has an external COPY program that handles wildcarded renaming while copying.

4) Boot real MS-DOS or FreeDOS in DOSBox.

I'll give those a try, thank you guys so much