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100% portable dosbox?

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First post, by nho

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tldr- how to make DOSBox not create any files outside installation folder?
so I need to run Dosbox on a lot of computers, and I only got the permission if I will not leave any traces...
at first, I thought- just use portable apps and that will be it... but it accrued to me that each time I run Dosbox it generates options, mapper etc which are saved in some folder and I can't be bothered to delete them each time. I just need a solution of how to not make them in the first place, maybe save them in the Dosbox directory, because then I will just delete the whole folder anyways...
also, web versions of Dosbox don't suit my needs as they (all the ones I have seen) cant save files (yeah I run a program, but that's not the point of the question if it hurts you- just change "files" for "save files") and take a long time to load, and the computers I will run that on aren't super fast (~10 yrs old maybe more) which means web browsing isn't the best...

Reply 2 of 8, by collector

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You can specify the location of any map or language file and capture directory in the conf and you can have your conf in the DOSBox directory or just use the "-conf-" switch argument for launching the game. Regardless, if on Windows there may still be some traces of it, such as an MRU entry in the registry or "stderr.txt" and "stdout.txt" files generated in the mounted folder. I doubt that this would change, even if you were to compile a build with the default output folder for the conf, map and language files as the same as DOSBox's.

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Reply 3 of 8, by leileilol

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make a dosbox.conf file in the dosbox directory

suddenly... ITS PORTABLE!!! no "Portable Apps Dot Com Special Edition" neccessary.

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Reply 4 of 8, by nho

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leileilol wrote:

make a dosbox.conf file in the dosbox directory

suddenly... ITS PORTABLE!!! no "Portable Apps Dot Com Special Edition" neccessary.

I did
but still when I press the "options" bat (or any of the other bat-s) by accident it takes me to a txt file in a local dir on the computer
also yeah, I too hate "portable apps dot com"
I just want to not leave any files outside the mounted dir and the dosbox dir (they will be the same dir in the end)

cyclone3d wrote:

You can make and compile as custom build.

I'm not that advanced...

collector wrote:

You can specify the location of any map or language file and capture directory in the conf and you can have your conf in the DOSBox directory or just use the "-conf-" switch argument for launching the game. Regardless, if on Windows there may still be some traces of it, such as an MRU entry in the registry or "stderr.txt" and "stdout.txt" files generated in the mounted folder. I doubt that this would change, even if you were to compile a build with the default output folder for the conf, map and language files as the same as DOSBox's.

can ya tell me how to just move all those directions into one big folder for all of them? I dont wanna use all those features anyways...
I already run it with a custom conf file (for other reasons) which is just the original with a few modifications
please give me a list of all the things I should check out how to change

Last edited by nho on 2017-11-21, 11:51. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 5 of 8, by dr_st

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nho wrote:
leileilol wrote:

make a dosbox.conf file in the dosbox directory

suddenly... ITS PORTABLE!!! no "Portable Apps Dot Com Special Edition" neccessary.

I did
but still when I press the "options" bat (or any of the other bat-s) by accident it takes me to a txt file in a local dir on the computer

Then change those .BAT files or delete them.

nho wrote:

I just want to not leave any files outside the mounted dir and the dosbox dir (they will be the same dir in the end)

There's nothing not portable in the default build of DOSBox. I've been running it exactly as leileilol described (with a local dosbox.conf) and just copying the entire directory (which also includes the subdirectories to mount) from one PC to another, for years.

Last edited by dr_st on 2017-11-21, 14:27. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 6 of 8, by zirkoni

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dr_st wrote:

Then changes those .BAT files or delete them.

Exactly. All you really need is:

dosbox.exe
SDL.dll
SDL_net.dll
dosbox.conf

and it's 100% portable.

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Reply 7 of 8, by Warmango

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How I have done it is I USE the PortableApps.com version, but at the end of the config file (DOSBox Portable\data\settings\DOSBox.conf)
I make the mount commands recurive using basic windows tricks, for example, mine is set up like so

>mount C %cd%\DOSBox\C

what the %cd% path does is it takes the current drive letter that the program is running from, and imports that, its useful for many batch scripts or simple programs that need to be installed in a portable environment,

Reply 8 of 8, by collector

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Besides dredging up a year old tread, using PortableApps for DOSBox is silly. All you need to make official DOSBox portable is to place your conf file in the same directory and make sure that there are no path settings with an absolute path in that conf. Also, the mount command can be set using relative paths as well. In your example if the "DOSBox" directory is where your DOSBox is you do not need to use %cd% as part of the path.

mount c .

will mount the DOSBox directory as C:

mount c C

will mount the "C" subdirectory as the C:

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