Daum is unsupported, unmaintained, and broken. Please use a mainline version or one which has a developer team that can address your questions.

So just what is such a version? The documentation I could find says that Daum is the main current developement version! This may be why people try to use it ...

It was never official. It was an attempt to jam as many largely untested patches into DOSBox, which adds to instability. EmuCR has a plain vanilla build http://www.emucr.com/search/label/DOSBox

For an enhanced build you can try DOSBox ECE DOSBox ECE (for Windows & Linux)

But keep in mind that the DOSBox team for SVN will support only plain vanilla builds.

Thanks collector I will try the ECE build.

Can you point us to the documentation that said that Daum is the official development build? If it's an abandonware site, send the link by PM.

It was my interpretation of the 'SVN Builds' page on the wiki. That page gives no indication of any problems with Daum or that it is unsupported or abandoned.

If I'd read more carefully - and I was just looking for information of any DOSBox newer than .74 - I should have seen, I think, that the official SVN builds do exist and are still maintained. However, no version numbers are assigned anymore, which leaves us in a situation like eduke32 - you never know what you're going to get ...

Is the newest DOSBox-lfn build a reasonable choice for stability combined with useful features?

koverhbarc wrote:

Is the newest DOSBox-lfn build a reasonable choice for stability combined with useful features?

It is a reasonable choice if your idea of "useful features" is limited to "Long File Name (LFN) and mouse copy/paste support", because that is what it is.

Otherwise the aforementioned ECE build is probably a better idea. (I suppose someone should add it to the wiki.)

Yeah, looking at the SVN Builds wiki page is bound to cause some confusion. Seems it's in need of an overhaul.

I'd suggest that every "enhanced" build that has not been updated for more than some pre-defined period (1-2 years) gets moved to the "obsolete" builds section. And Daum specifically needs a big bold warning that the latest version is broken, and perhaps a link to a known good old version.

Would do it myself, but I think it's locked and I cannot create an account at this time.

My question about DOSBox-lfn was more about stability than features - will it run correctly everything .74 does and hopefully more? However LFN support really should be considered essential; even if you're not running any LFN-aware stuff you may still have long directory names to deal with and it's easy to accidentally trash long names.

koverhbarc wrote:

My question about DOSBox-lfn was more about stability than features - will it run correctly everything .74 does and hopefully more?

It is the plain vanilla SVN with the LFN and mouse copy/paste support. Accordingly, it is just as stable as the plain vanilla SVN.

However, no version numbers are assigned anymore.

I should add that most of the up-to-date SVN builds at least appear to have SVN revision numbers.

However LFN support really should be considered essential; even if you're not running any LFN-aware stuff you may still have long directory names to deal with and it's easy to accidentally trash long names.

While such problems were feasible back in the days of MS-DOS 6.22, it is quite unlikely for DOSBox to "trash long names" unless perhaps you deliberately set out to do so, and perhaps not even then.

Jorpho wrote:

While such problems were feasible back in the days of MS-DOS 6.22, it is quite unlikely for DOSBox to "trash long names" unless perhaps you deliberately set out to do so, and perhaps not even then.

An interesting scenario I can think of - mount a directory in vanilla DOSBox that has one or more long filenames inside. DOSBox will show them truncated one way or the other? Then rename it to something 8.3. What happens to the original name? Will there be an "orphaned" LFN entry somewhere?

Can't check that from Windows, but confirmed that copying a directory results in losing all its long names. Perhaps that's why DOSBox got rid of the MOVE command; if so, that's inelegant. I know it's a personal preference, but I'd rather have it and never worry.

When I commented on stability, presumably not all the SVN releases are guaranteed to be equally stable and I figured the LFN team would have chosen the last one that is.

dr_st wrote:

An interesting scenario I can think of - mount a directory in vanilla DOSBox that has one or more long filenames inside. DOSBox will show them truncated one way or the other? Then rename it to something 8.3. What happens to the original name? Will there be an "orphaned" LFN entry somewhere?

I'm not sure it's even possible to have an orphaned LFN entry on an NTFS-formatted drive (or possibly even on a FAT32-formatted drive). In any case, DOSBox (and pretty much any other Windows program) is not capable of the sort of low-level disk access necessary for that to happen, if I'm not mistaken.

koverhbarc wrote:

Can't check that from Windows, but confirmed that copying a directory results in losing all its long names.

See, there's not much reason you'd ever want to do that from DOSBox.

I might add that the MOVE command was only introduced in MS-DOS 6.

When I commented on stability, presumably not all the SVN releases are guaranteed to be equally stable and I figured the LFN team would have chosen the last one that is.

I think the LFN team just doesn't bother making a new release every time there's a new SVN revision.

The only time people have ever really commented on stability at all is with the SVN Daum build, which is after all a conglomeration of experimental patches. I can't recall any discussion of any one vanilla SVN build being substantially less stable.

You can use MOVE.EXE from MS-DOS 6, or the one from FreeDOS, in DOSBox. Historically it was not an internal shell command.

But neither will preserve LFNs, will they? I only would like one because sometimes I'm in DOSBox and don't want to switch to a regular command prompt for a single operation, and I've even forgotten that I'm in DOSBox.

koverhbarc wrote:

and I've even forgotten that I'm in DOSBox.

It's rather difficult to mistake DOSBox for the NTVDM considering the font is entirely different.

If you find yourself uncontrollably doing file management in DOSBox, then I suspect you are unlike 99.9% of other DOSBox users. But no one's stopping you from using DOSBox-lfn if you like.

Assuming you use DOSBox only for DOS games (and the occasional app), and not for running Win9x in one of the unofficial builds - why would you even have any long file names in any directory mounted by DOSBox?

And I am in fact now using DOSBox-lfn. I've already found a use for mouse copy-paste, and automatic mounting is an obvious benefit as well. Though I now mount all my hard disk partitions in autoexec so I can use the same paths I'm used to typing (and not waste any time manually mounting or remembering what I have mounted where), that won't work for the floppy drive as it gives a fatal error with no disk in it (the wiki says that floppy drives are automatically mounted - they aren't).

As to how I could make the mistake, the fonts certainly aren't entirely different when fullscreen (NTVDM starts in 50-line mode, yes, but gets reset to 25-line (as DOSBox) when an application exits), which I was at the time and prefer.

koverhbarc wrote:

Though I now mount all my hard disk partitions in autoexec so I can use the same paths I'm used to typing (and not waste any time manually mounting or remembering what I have mounted where)

Good God.