For some reason I thought there was floppy swapping ability with a hotkey for similar reasons, any way to abuse that? Or am I thinking of a different em?

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-05-31, 13:59:

For some reason I thought there was floppy swapping ability with a hotkey for similar reasons, any way to abuse that? Or am I thinking of a different em?

That features has been available in DOSBox SVN for a while, though it is not in the standard DOSBox release. Either way, I doubt it would help much here.

Jorpho wrote on 2021-05-31, 14:11:

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-05-31, 13:59:

For some reason I thought there was floppy swapping ability with a hotkey for similar reasons, any way to abuse that? Or am I thinking of a different em?

That features has been available in DOSBox SVN for a while, though it is not in the standard DOSBox release. Either way, I doubt it would help much here.

If only it was possible to "patch in" the DOSBox-X features that allow for the emulation of the IDE drive interfaces within Windows, but I imagine that involved a massive amount of re-work from the ground up. And of course, it is well outside the scope of regular DOSBox.

It requires emulating the actual IDE/ATA hardware which is never needed for DOS games. Unless there's some way to make win95 access an ATAPI drive via BIOS calls, but I don't think there is.

DOSBox does not support Win9X.

You can use Daemon Tools/ Magicdisc to create multiple CD-ROM and mount all them at once. Most of the Win9x games are smart enough to scan through them and never prompt for CD again. Descent Freespace/Freespace 2/AvP1 are those that I had tested such way. I use the same trick on QEMU.

kjliew wrote on 2021-06-01, 05:19:

DOSBox does not support Win9X.

Yes, that is why I wrote a whole paragraph in my first post to try to head off such a comment. 😉

Thanks, I will try out Daemon Tools/ Magicdisc to see if that offers better functionality than Virtual Clone Drive.

I realize most games are fine with reading from multiple virtual drives, but as I pointed out above, I am attempting to find work-arounds for the very few games that do not. (i.e. Sierra SCI games)

The specific solution I found for Phantasmagoria 2 (which I mentioned above) is to set the Windows desktop resolution to 800x600, and then edit the Resource.win file to include the following line:

titleBarFixed=TRUE

This will cause the title bar (and the Windows taskbar) to be visible during gameplay, which allows for the swapping of CDs via the Virtual Clone Drive menu interface. Setting the screen resolution lower than 800x600 will result in some of the gameplay window being obscured by the Windows taskbar, even when it is minimized.

I presume this method would work for a number of Sierra games that are compatible with the above command.

EDIT: The same method works with Rama as well.

After all that, I only just realized that control-esc does work in Windows 95 and 98, so I can still use that to access the task bar in most instances (and hence swap the images using the Virtual Clone Drive menu bar icon). Not as quick or user-friendly as a key combination, but it gets the job done.