I've been trying to run an old DOS game under DOSBox, Nels Anderson's (Arcanum Computing) "Dragon's Bane: Mah Jongg II".

I own the registered version of this game (as well as another by the same developer "Second Guess"). Upon installation, both of these games create a small binary file with your registration info contained in them (DRAGON.REG and GUESS.REG), and the installer copies them to the games' installation directories on your hard drive.

After experimenting for awhile trying to figure out why the games say "unregistered" when running them, I think I finally tracked down the problem. The games expect the DRAGON.REG and GUESS.REG files to have the 'hidden' file attribute set, and after searching through the forums here, it doesn't appear that DOSBox supports file attributes. The games run fine otherwise, they simply act as if they are not registered (feature limitations, nag screens, etc...).

Anyhow, I was wondering if anyone knows of a workaround for this problem... DOSBox not refelecting (or supporting) file attributes? Is there as special 'build' of DOSBox that supports file attributes? DOSBox is the only way to reliably run these games under WinDoZe XP, and unless the 'REG' files in question are tagged as 'hidden', the games still 'think' they are shareware.