1 - Load a ZIP as a RAM drive.
2 - Run the game from ZIP's autoexec.bat.
3 - When the emulator is closed, run a diff between t […]
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1 - Load a ZIP as a RAM drive.
2 - Run the game from ZIP's autoexec.bat.
3 - When the emulator is closed, run a diff between the RAM drive contents and the zipfile.
4 - Write modified files to disk.
5 - when doing 1 again, check for files on disk and replace as needed
I was actually thinking of almost the same kind of thing...
Instead of having an autoexex.bat or any other bat launch the game, how about if after having parsed through the ZIP file, it gives a list of possible launch files it finds (.exe, .bat, or .com found in the root of the file), and once selected, you could tell Dosbox to always load that zipfile with that executable the next time.
Furthermore, here's a really clean way of handling diff'ed files, and even config files for each game. All we need are 3 folders, one called Games, one called Diff, and one called Config
We keep the archives ZIP files in Games. In the Diff folder, a ZIP file with the same filename as the game in "Games" is kept with obviously the diff files that game has modified in the past. Finally, in the Config folder, a text file for each game loaded in the past, the text file could be formatted in a way to keep specific autexec.bat/config.sys and DosBox specific settings.
Now in regards to the question about the indexing the games. This is not necessary, each one of us could keep a small clean setup for our games. But with the above standardized framework in place, we could then easily share our DATs that include a standard naming convention. Hell I always wished for a TOSEC-like PC Games database. This would be a swell time to go ahead with that finally! (If not already of course).
Regarding the question of loosing the data if/when the emulator crashes. True, that's a problem, but that's also a problem with any and all emulators. How about this to help solve that: Set a hotkey, so that if it's pressed in-game, it pauses the game, does a dif on the files and modifies the ZIP file stored in the "Diff" folder as necessary. So that if you're far into a game, and you're worried about DosBox crashing, you can go ahead, at the price of a few seconds take care of that.
Finally, regarding the spirit of running DOS games, I understand where that comes from, I use to be heavily into DOS like most of you here. I have however become spoiled by all sorts of other Emulators, and love their pick a game and go philosophy, while still keeping a very clean archived set of roms/disks/sets (through Goodsets, TOSEC, MAME, etc...). Furthermore, people that were always interested in playing these games but are/were intimidated by using DOS because they never had to in the past will have a much easier time in enjoying the same games we can enjoy easily. And if more people can play as they say, there's nothing wrong with that!
Benji99