Oh, you are a real genius. If you'd take the time to read the DOSBox readme, and search VOGONS and the Web for tutorials, you'd quickly notice that other people had that grand idea before you.

But, by all means, go ahead and write your own tutorials! You seem to be a qualified DOSBox specialist (QDS, maybe we should define an exam path about this (; ), so you're the man for writing these manuals!

JurjenB wrote:

Why don't we write a step-by-step manual explaining how to install a classic game (Windows or DOS) on Windows XP/Vista?

At all in DOS, that's game-dependent. Every game handles different,
except "enter 'install' and follow the on-screen directions..."

ADDiCT,

Thank you very much for insulting me. And MiniMax thinks I will make friends! For an ´oldbie´ I expected a much friendlier person, you....! The same to you!!

If you're experiencing problems during the installation of a specific game, you can always ask for help in the right section of the forum, no need to have people document the installation process for every game out there, it would take longer than we have years to live.

I started writing a guide as I installed all the DOS games I had. I'm waiting for a few more that I ordered. I haven't decided about posting the full thing. If I did it would just be a reference. In no way would it be a manual to getting every game working on your system. You seem to have rather high expectations for how useful such a thing would be. I suspect anything provided would fall far short.

A definitive manual is difficult because settings that work for one person might not work for everyone. Additionally unless you spend hours play testing every game there may be problems later on that you wouldn't know about. Possibly a different setting would fix it or it may be confined to the game itself. In my effort I only spent about 5 minutes making sure the sound worked, video looked nice, and speed was adequate.

Hmm put it in the Wiki?

Just the 60 seconds guide in the guides section is usually enough to get about 90% or more games to work if the guide is followed to the letter. If that doesn't work a help post in the forum works wonders as long as you follow the posting guidelines and you know how to ask questions ( even then mostly the outcome is that the 60 seconds guide has not been followed).
That said guides for those 10% games that need special care would be nice...

A few things I found or are well known from other topics:

Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure doesn't like Sound Blaster 16.

Bioforge wants to be installed from drive E and requires IRQ 5.

HyperSpeed installer didn't work in DOSBox at all. Outside of DOSBox it didn't know the correct disk to find files on and aborted.

Quake can get confused if both Sound Blaster and Gravis Ultrasound are enabled.

Ripper requires that a VESA driver is loaded before starting.

Space Hulk audio plays too fast when using SoundBlaster 16.

T2 The Arcade Game installer does things slightly out of order. The option to setup sound is second to the option to install which doesn't bring you back to the menu.

I also made notes about where to download patches and specific mounting for games that expect files in a certain location.

Please stop recommending old dosbox versions, edit your thread accordingly.

I usually don't have trouble figuring out how to install a DOS game, but for people that never used real DOS it might be a bit of a challenge. What might be handy is some specifics for each game, but not a complete step by step example that might differ depending on each person's setup. For example how do you initiate the installation process? One game might be installed by typing install, where another one uses setup, and I have seen some .bat installers where you would have to type in something like install c: to specify the install drive. Others do not have an install program at all, they either run from floppy or CD without requiring a hard drive installation. Others had separate install programs for the VGA and EGA/CGA/Tandy versions.

Other specifics like the floppy requiring volume labels. Access Software such as Links Course disks required those or it wouldn't install. Does it require EMS/XMS? Most conventional memory issues should be a thing of the past since I get more free memory with DOSBox than I ever had in real DOS. Known issues documented.

MiniMax's guide does a great job showing how to use DOSBox and mount drives and such so there isn't a need to repeat that, but having some game specific info might not be a bad idea.

Game-specific information is supposed to be put into the wiki or the ompatibility database.