Perhaps you can follow a guide, it makes it pretty clear you need to use a ISO image for Mechwarrior 2.

https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Main_Page Full Wiki, scroll down to find the Wiki for mounting a CD Drive.

https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/GAMES:MechWarrior_2 Full guide for Mechwarrior 2

Or would you like a guide on how to use Google too ? This Wiki took me 10 seconds to find.

It's easy for greybeards like us to forget that younger people did not grow up with a command line in front of them; they had tablets and the like instead.

Perhaps something more like Dosbox-X or Dosbox-Staging, with the GUI, would be more their liking, if made a bit less byzantine? Sorta like how various virtualizers (VirtualBox, x86box, bochs, qtqemu, vmware, etc) do things? Added overhead but might be worthwhile in the end?

Personally, I am just fine with the command line, and find the "-c FOO" invocation option *extremely* useful. You can mount an iso, then unmount it after, or set the cycles=###, and any number of other things, right on the application shortcut/launcher. Super useful.

I preferred original cd

MechWarriorZero wrote on 2024-09-23, 09:33:

I preferred original cd

If you read the Wiki it clearly says that DOSbox cant properly emulate the way the copy protection works on the CD, pretty much means you will have to use the work around with an ISO to get it to work correctly.

Its not a matter of making it easier to use as its already pretty easy with the Wiki, if you insist on the original CD then I guess you could always use a real DOS PC.

You have the original disk so making an ISO of it is perfectly fine for your own use, if you want to noise then throw a music CD in there an play that while playing the game .. itll make a nice racket and give you that "Real" hardware feel.

wierd_w wrote on 2024-09-23, 09:11:

It's easy for greybeards like us to forget that younger people did not grow up with a command line in front of them; they had tablets and the like instead.

Perhaps something more like Dosbox-X or Dosbox-Staging, with the GUI, would be more their liking, if made a bit less byzantine? Sorta like how various virtualizers (VirtualBox, x86box, bochs, qtqemu, vmware, etc) do things? Added overhead but might be worthwhile in the end?

Personally, I am just fine with the command line, and find the "-c FOO" invocation option *extremely* useful. You can mount an iso, then unmount it after, or set the cycles=###, and any number of other things, right on the application shortcut/launcher. Super useful.

Another emulator may work but its the copy protection on the original disk that's the issue here . .I doubt many if any emulators can make that work correctly or at all since it would be looking for real hardware interrupts that dont emulate correctly in an emulator.

An ISO is a perfectly fine work around.

The various hardware shenanigans publishers have tried to pretend readable data cant be copied data, and their knock-on headaches aside, one CAN tell dosbox to mount a drive letter as a cdrom, and to pass io-control messages. Just be aware that the actual OS providing the interface may decide to tell you to pound sand on certain kinds of operations, such as with the above copy protection issues.

If you want to mount a real drive ANYWAY...

Then you should try mounting the drive letter with the -ioctl flag.

MOUNT E G:\ -t cdrom -usecd 0 -ioctl

For example.

is there another dos emulator that is better

The issue is that modern windows basically denies user mode applications that level of raw access, and that would hit EVERY emulator/virtualizer that uses real disks.
(it also denies trying to hook privileged kernel space to try and circumvent that restriction, because it was a security vuln. See also, "Why SafeDisc and SecuROM do not work anymore, AT ALL, on windows")

Linux might be a little different, haven't looked into it. ISO is more convenient.

I have two thin clients that I am trying to run Windows 95/DOS, I did managed to find a DOS using the sound blaster emulator but some games crashes due to the sound blaster emulator

A thin client is ... unlikely... to have a physical CDROM drive present. However, if it does, and it exposes ATA, then just OAKCDROM.SYS + MSCDEX.EXE would be just fine.

Otherwise, you might need a USB cdrom drive, and need to find a USBCD.SYS driver that works with it. (Good luck. It's hit and miss.)

One can STILL use .ISO images from real dos with the SHUSCDX package. (the full package. It has an ISO based cdrom emulation dos driver.)

In addition to SBEMU, there is also the VSBHDA project. They do things a little differently in terms of how the dos extender works, and thus have different compatibility lists.
https://github.com/Baron-von-Riedesel/VSBHDA

I don't need sound blaster emulation, I need real sound drivers for DOS

'Isa dma based soundblaster functionality' hasn't been a thing for a *very* long time, in terms of audio hardware.

Likewise, 'real OPL chip!' Hasnt been a thing for a long time either.

Thin clients usually have some flavor of intel HD Audio Bus based audio solution. These are what SBEMU and VSBHDA target. They are a very basic audio driver for these modern solutions, paired with a custom trap handler to trap attempts to use soundblaster resources, and to route them to the modern hardware.

I have a ibm aptiva E series 2170 running Windows 98, but I also want to run Windows 95 and DOS on it

There is a 1gb disk image of the original IBM system restore CD for that model on Internet Archive. Vogon's rules require I not provide a link, due to dubious software licensing stuff.

It has an ISA slot, so a genuine soundblaster, Pro Audio Spectrum, etc-- could be put there.
If you dont feel like forking out $$$$$$$, you can spend $$$ on a snarkbarker, or Llamablaster instead.

I tried that CD and it has a corrupted command.com file

I tried that CD and it has a corrupted command.com file

wierd_w wrote on 2024-09-23, 10:56:

There is a 1gb disk image of the original IBM system restore CD for that model on Internet Archive. Vogon's rules require I not provide a link, due to dubious software licensing stuff.

It has an ISA slot, so a genuine soundblaster, Pro Audio Spectrum, etc-- could be put there.
If you dont feel like forking out $$$$$$$, you can spend $$$ on a snarkbarker, or Llamablaster instead.

What OS is the host?
See my sig if w10/11 and probably 7

Windows 95

Any reason you're not just installing the w95 version then?