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First post, by rossl

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I have an old music ear training program I am trying to use. The program (called EAR by Ibis) came on a 3.5 floppy. This is how it worked when originally purchased:

1) In an older version of windows I would go to the DOS promp
2) change to the "a" drive (floppy is in this drive)
3) Type ear (to engage the ear.exe file on the floppy)

I have tried to get the program to work again using DOSBOX

1) I installed Dosbox,
2) copied the program files from the floppy to a folder on the c
3) Open DOSBOX
4) Mounted the C drive
I am stuck here, I cannot get the ear.exe to work any suggestions?

Reply 1 of 18, by Dominus

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mount the folder as a floppy, so if the program is in C:\whatever\ear\ear.exe then do the following commands in dosbox:
mount a c:\whatever\ear -t floppy
a:
ear

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Reply 2 of 18, by rossl

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Got it to work on the A floppy

mount c a:\ -t floppy

changed to c

then typed ear and the program loaded and worked

THANK YOU!!!!!

Your exampled help me figure it out. It's been a while since I used DOS commands.

Is there anyway to create a shortcut?

Reply 3 of 18, by Dominus

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yes, open the dosbox.conf with notepad and edit the autoexec section with the commands you gave., then just start Dosbox 😀

(btw. to save your floppy from tear, you could still do it the way I gave above and load it your hard drive while the program *thinks* it is on a floppy 😀

Windows 3.1x guide for DOSBox
60 seconds guide to DOSBox
DOSBox SVN snapshot for macOS (10.4-11.x ppc/intel 32/64bit) notarized for gatekeeper

Reply 4 of 18, by rossl

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I am doing something wrong when trying to access the files I copied from the floppy to the my C hard drive.

What is the proper way to establish a new directory on the hard drive?

DOSBOX keeps saying directory does not exist

Reply 7 of 18, by rossl

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I tried

Mount c c:/"programs"/"ear"

This did not work, get the follwoing

directory c:/programs/ear does not exist

Reply 8 of 18, by Dominus

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why the quotes? and it should be "mount c c:\programs\ear" or if you follow what I wrote "mount a c:\programs\ear -t floppy" (since Dosbox can make it seem like a folder on oyur hd is a floppy drive 😀).
The most important question though, where did you put the ears stuff on your real hd? C:\programs\ear or some other folder?

Windows 3.1x guide for DOSBox
60 seconds guide to DOSBox
DOSBox SVN snapshot for macOS (10.4-11.x ppc/intel 32/64bit) notarized for gatekeeper

Reply 9 of 18, by rossl

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I created a file fin the programs file called ear. I copied all of the files from the floppy into that folder

Reply 10 of 18, by rossl

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I created a file in the programs file called ear on the C hard drive. I copied all of the files from the floppy into that folder

Reply 12 of 18, by rossl

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Now it works. Thank you so much!

Reply 13 of 18, by eL_PuSHeR

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[Thread moved to DOSBox Games/Apps. Section]

Reply 14 of 18, by rossl

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What is the purpose of the -t floppy command?

Reply 15 of 18, by Dominus

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That the folder/drive is handled/emulated as a floppy drive. Some floppy games might complain if they aren't run on a floppy.

Windows 3.1x guide for DOSBox
60 seconds guide to DOSBox
DOSBox SVN snapshot for macOS (10.4-11.x ppc/intel 32/64bit) notarized for gatekeeper

Reply 16 of 18, by Qbix

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I don't recommend using the flag though, unless you are certain that you need it.

Water flows down the stream
How to ask questions the smart way!

Reply 18 of 18, by Qbix

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technically the flag does 2 main things:
1) set the diskspace to the size of a floppy (always a good thing)
2) always reset the drivecaching on each request. The latter is great is if you have multiple floppies (no need for ctrl-f4) However the caching of findfirsts is there for a reason. (some games require consistent results when having multiple findfirst/findnexts running. (those are broken then))

Water flows down the stream
How to ask questions the smart way!