I've been trying to tackle the CD swapping issue in DS9 Harbinger, mainly because it runs better on the hard drive. Now I've searched the forum and seen the possible solutions. Firstly the game doesn't support multiple CD drives, it expects Disc 2 in the same drive as Disc 1 and won't search anywhere else.

Secondly I could use Daemon Tools or a different mounting program externally and then RESCAN, but I keep all my games on an external hard drive and take this external HD to work. Basically its my entertainment during my breaks. The work computers won't allow the user to install new software not to mention we switch computers often, but these games are setup on my external HD so they don't need installing or anything on the internal HD. So I want a solution where the game is reliant on DOSBox or something that doesn't need installing.

Anyway, what I've done so far is find out how the game knows if it has the correct CD or not. It will not load a labelless CD but the label doesn't need to be anything specific. What it's in fact looking for is a file called "CD", no extension. This file contains one number. On Disk 1 its 0 and on Disk 2 its 1.

I've experimented with the file, to try and get it to think both Disc's 1 & 2 are present, but it will only read the first digit of the first line in the file. All others are ignored. Multiple "CD" files won't work either, e.g. CD1 and CD2, it will only read the file named "CD" in the specific directory called Torpedos.

The method I came up with to swap the CD's was a batch file. Upon executing it, it switches the number in the "CD" file. So if its 1 it becomes 0, and if its 0 it becomes 1. So when I'm playing the game and come to a load Disc 1/2 screen, I minimise DOSBox from fullscreen, double click the bat file, re-enter DOSBox and tell the game to attempt to load the disk, and there you go success.

By the way, I placed all of files from Disk 1 & 2 into the same folder called CDROM and mounted that as drive D: . The only shared file between the two disks which are different in content is the "CD" file.

What I'm after is the ability to execute this bat file without having to minimise DOSBox out of fullscreen. What I'm wandering is can I bind a key combo to execute a command line within DOSBox which would switch this value. Like change the binding of Ctrl-F4 from RESCAN to a command line that executes the bat file.

I suspect the answer is no. But I'm posting this just in case it can be done. I checked out the Keymapping feature, and found no evidence that you could add you own "command line" based key bindings. But I didn't look very hard and could have easily missed it. Also if anyone has any alternative ideas of how to tackle this I would be happy to hear them.