I guess the real question is, what is DOS's problem with dashes?

tomexplodes wrote on 2020-10-24, 03:12:

And I've determined what the issue is. There are files with names such as ce-1-1.sie, up through 11 or 12 sometimes, but somehow DOS is reading them as ce_1_1~1.sie etc. even though they aren't more than 8 characters. How do I get them to copy over or be read as they are and not incorrectly? I don't want to go through and rename them all manually in DOS.

And how exactly did you determine this..? A name like "ce_1_1~1" sounds like something you would get on a Win9x machine when you're trying to use a long file name, but you're saying this is a DOS machine?

tomexplodes wrote on 2020-10-25, 04:37:

I guess the real question is, what is DOS's problem with dashes?

You might be able to get away with it in Win9x, but I don't think DOS recognizes a dash as a valid character in file names – just like you can't have a file name with a space in it without using tricks. There are disk utilities that can let you give files invalid names, though offhand I can't think of one that I would recommend except for maybe an old version of Norton Utilities.

I'm guessing the game is programmed to use files with these names as a crude means of copy protection.

I figured out how to get around it. I copied over zip files and pkunzip and unzipped them into the folders I wanted. It didn't mess up the filenames. I'm all set. Thanks!