Alexander,
Excellent work on D-Fend Reloaded version 1.0.0 !
I am using your D-Fend Reloaded DOSBox fron=end to configure a retro-to-2005 'game' machine for my young nephew. This build is an Aopen AX6BC (Intel 440BX) based motherboard with a PowerLeap Slot-1 adapter with an Intel 1.4GHz Tulatin Celeron processor and 768MB of ECC RAM. Constructed with an IDE 80GB Seagate 7200.10 hard drive, a IDE Sony DVD-ROM drive, the video is provided by an NVidia 5950U adapter, the monitor a 19" Dell M993s for 85Hz refresh for both DOS and Windows. The operating system is Win98SE. The audio is provided by a Creative Labs SoundBlaster Live! PCI audio card in conjunction with a Creative Labs AWE64 Gold ISA audio card; plus a Roland MT-32 for older DOS games with the Roland Virtual Sound Canvas for 'newer' General MIDI based games.
Using DOSBox 0.74+ (via D-Fend Reloaded) and the ability of D-Fend Reloaded to execute DOS games via DOSBox, ScummVM, the native Win98SE DOSVM (for CPU intensive DOS games) and Windows Win32 games is a huge plus. Especially nice is the implementation 'helper' programs which can be executed both before and after the main program execution. Besides ensuring that the correct ICC file is re-loaded to the NVidia video card LUT, these features will allow me to transparently mix and match the various DOS/Windows game programs to any of the possible audio/MIDI sources - from either an MT-32 attached to the AWE64 Gold game/MIDI port, to SoundFonts loaded on either the AWE64 Gold or the SoundBlaster Live! or to the Roland Virtual Sound Canvas.
Without D-Fend Reloaded this integration would have been much more difficult - and the end result of a point and click game launching interface for a GUI-oriented 'yute' would not have been realized so cleanly. Again, a well-thought out interface and extra feature in the mini-database for the games and any of its attached program or data files, plus graphics, videos, sounds, notes and additional data.
I did, however come across a few 'bugs' which might make your D-Fend Reloaded v1.0.1 Service release. One is common to both Win98SE and WinXP (SP2) and two seems exclusive to Win98SE.
First item which affects both Win98SE and WinXP is in the "Profile/Sound/MIDI" page. Specifically the "Additional Settings" which uses the "Select MIDI device from Device Manager" drop-down control. This will execute DOSBox with the DOSBox "Mixer /ListMidi" command to gain the current MIDI device names and device numbers for the drop-down list control. Selection of one of the listed MIDI devices from the drop-down list will write "midiconfig=X" to the "Additional Settings" input box. However, the Profile MIDI selection will not function due to the fact that the D-Fend Reloaded on-the-fly written DOSBox.CONF file will now contain the following sub-section:
[midi]
mpu401=uart
mididevice=win32
midiconfig=midiconfig=X
The "midiconfig=" string is prepended to the Additional Settings" selection box text inserted from the list drop-down control. The work-around is manually edit the Additional Settings" text box to only input the device number.
As an aside, the MIDI selection in D-Fend Reloaded can function differently in the Win9x family vs the WinNT based operating systems. Win98SE, once the Sound-cards and MIDI devices are installed has a stable MIDI device numbering scheme - no matter what the default MIDI device selection may be. However, the WinXP MIDI device numbers are not so constant, depending on the currently selected default MIDI device, all of the other MIDI device numbers change - except for the MIDI Mapper. So you might note that for WinXP+ any MIDI device selected by number in D-Fend Reloaded Profile may not be the same one that is selected at runtime if the default WinXP MIDI device selection has changed in the meantime.
The other 'bug' only appears on Win98SE. It appears that if any ICON or SCREENSHOT graphics file are in the PNG format - then D-Fend Reloaded will then display an error message of "Access violation at address 0165E590. Read of address FFFFFFFF." Since the native format of DOSBox captures via the keyboard CTRL-F5 mechanism is the PNG graphics format, this might be a problem. Conversion of any PNG based file to another graphics format is the current work-around. This error does not occur on WinXP (SP2).
The only other possible problem that I noted was the Win98SE does not seem to be able to support one of the D-Fend Reloaded "extras". It may be that Win98SE is not the really a supported platform for D-Fend Reloaded extras - but the error message for either Floppy or CD image create from real media is "Could not open Drive X for direct reading."Under Win98SE none of the image function seem to work.
Again, congratulations on the release of D-Fend Reloaded version 1.0.0, it is an solidly built and full featured front-end for DOSBox.
dvwjr