have you followed the guide? 60 seconds guide to getting your game to run in DOSBox

Yes I know how to setup games with DOSBox. This is a problem specific to this game.

just in case post your mountings so we know you know for sure

Finally found someone else who had same problem and knew what to do.. Appraently game directory can't be mounted directly as c:, but instead as a subfolder.. Odd but true.

resin wrote:

Yes I know how to setup games with DOSBox.

You apparently don't know how to do it correctly, and following the guide would likely have solved your "problem", because it does not instruct you to mount the game folder directly.

Even if some games let you get away with it, mounting the game folder directly is always incorrect. Doing it that way the game sees itself as running from the root directory, and how many games do you know of that are installed in the root?

Well out of the several hundred games I've setup with DOSBox this is the only one that has had this problem, and all were mounted directly. And you might want to check again because the example shown there does say to mount the game folder directly as c:

[autoexec] mount C "C:\Users\your-user-name\Documents\DOSBox stuff\MyGame" mount D "D:\" -t cdrom C: […]
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[autoexec]
mount C "C:\Users\your-user-name\Documents\DOSBox stuff\MyGame"
mount D "D:\" -t cdrom
C:

That's exactly how I've always done it.. But with this particular game, I had to put the game files inside a subfolder within the initially mounted folder and add additional commands to the conf like this..

mount C "C:\Users\your-user-name\Documents\DOSBox stuff\MyGame"
mount D "D:\" -t cdrom
C:
cd subfolder
game.exe

That's the only way this particular game will read the files correctly. I don't know if you misunderstood me before or what, but no need for the hostility either way.

there was no hostility.
Anyway you actually found a bug in the guide:
it should be:

Use the cd name-of-folder command to move into a folder (also known as a <DIR>ectory), and cd .. to move out again. In each folder, do a dir /w until you see the MyGame.Exe / MyGame.Bat file. Now start it with:

C:\name-of-folder>MyGame