Why does your "very old" application use windows encodings?

The app was written for dos3.3

It requires access to two folders "y" and "y[ALT255]"

Without this it does not work, i can get it running on win7 x86

I need dosbox to get it on win7 x64

The issue derives from Unicode...
I wrote you a little program file that might or might not help you, it will create a y folder with a unicode nbsp character at the end wherever you run it, it needs .net framework 4 and the source is included so you can tinker with it and find a unicode character that works for you if mine doesn't. The source is for Visual C# 2010 (it will work on Express). Since I don't have the program, I can't test it; running it under Windows doesn't really look promising because of the above Unicode issues, though you can try and see if some character works.
You can also try alt-0160.

unfortunatly its not teh creation of the directory that i need, I need dosbox to be able to read teh file path correctly, if teh folder is called "y " and dos box is looking for "yÿ" its not going to work.

this is what seems to be occuring

hmm I just checked.
255 is an allowed character in dosbox.
So I guess your operating system is doing some translation on the name ?

just a point if i do a command in dosbox

mkdir xALT255xALT0255x

the output i see is

x x x

but windows displays this as

xÿxÿx

somehow i think DOSbox is confused between char sets

i'm wondering if i copy the files to a hard drive image file, if i would be able to work better eliminating windows and solely using dosbox
but i'm yet to figure out how to create and mount a hard drive, anyone who could give me line by line instructions on how to create a 10MB HD would be good

See the guides section of the forum

ok apparently it works as Yÿ

i just forgot i was mounting my c:\awbd folder as c:

the program needs it to be c:\awbd

so i set teh mouth to mount c to c and bingo (i know this is dangerous, but i dont mind i can sort that later

the program now runs, now i just have to sort a few odd errors.....this never ends!!!!

Yeah move that into any other folder and mount that as c. Sorted