Re: Wrong size for mounted image in DosBox

Hmmm, so while this isn't a DOSBox specific issue, perhaps a warning should be added in the DOSBox manual?

Also, I now use an external image creation tool (Bochs'BXImage) which ignores the FDisk limitation when giving you your image's geometry. Perhaps DOSBox should have its own image creation tool specifically designed with old FDisk version limitations? DOSBox is in my opinion already one of the easiest to use and by far the best emulators available, but a few extra tools for people wishing to use their own virtual disk images would make it even better. In my opinion that is.

Thank you ripsaw8080,

imgmount 2 d:\other\win95\c.img -size 512,32,64,1023 -fs none -t hdd

worked.

Peter Swinkels wrote on 2021-03-01, 08:38:

but a few extra tools for people wishing to use their own virtual disk images would make it even better. In my opinion that is.

DOSBox-X already includes an "imgmake" command for this purpose.

It seems reasonable that this feature is not included in standard DOSBox as it is mostly needed for more exotic purposes and is almost never a concern for running DOS games.

Hmmm I agree and disagree here. I agree in so far as that I understand DOSBox shouldn't cater to every niche possible, on the other hand there are people wishing to run software that only runs properly on Windows 9x/ME for example. With a better integrated disk image support this would be a lot easier. Also, I did get Windows 95 running in DOSBox but it runs poorly.

Perhaps an emulator called WinBox or something should be created specifically for Windows 9x/ME and games meant for the Pentium I and II? Those usually don't run or barely on modern Windows and hardware and it's the same with just about any virtual machine I have tried. It seems as though that kind of software falls between the extremes of being too old and too new at the same time.

Peter Swinkels wrote on 2021-03-04, 20:25:

Perhaps an emulator called WinBox or something should be created specifically for Windows 9x/ME

I hope you don't think you're the first person to think of such things. There is in fact another another thread discussing the abundance of such alternatives.
How do you install Win95 or Win98 in DOSBox?

You may also consider BoxedWine. (There's also Winevdm, but that is more concerned with 16-bit Windows applications, as is Win3mu - though I'm not sure that ever got a full release.)

Peter Swinkels wrote on 2021-03-04, 20:25:

Hmmm I agree and disagree here. I agree in so far as that I understand DOSBox shouldn't cater to every niche possible, on the other hand there are people wishing to run software that only runs properly on Windows 9x/ME for example. With a better integrated disk image support this would be a lot easier. Also, I did get Windows 95 running in DOSBox but it runs poorly.

Perhaps an emulator called WinBox or something should be created specifically for Windows 9x/ME and games meant for the Pentium I and II? Those usually don't run or barely on modern Windows and hardware and it's the same with just about any virtual machine I have tried. It seems as though that kind of software falls between the extremes of being too old and too new at the same time.

your using the wrong tool for the job. use Virtualbox instead.

@Jorpho - no I don’t think I am the first one, in fact I made the suggestion because I suspect others have played with the same idea.

@oldbie: virtualbox has such a half assed support for hardware it failed miserably at running any old Windows version in any useful manner. I got impossible to fix graphics and sound issues for my trouble and still couldn’t get the game I wanted to play to work.

It seems the emulators that already are available just aren’t specialized enough to properly support classic Windows for gaming.

Peter Swinkels wrote on 2021-03-04, 21:07:

virtualbox has such a half assed support for hardware it failed miserably at running any old Windows version in any useful manner. I got impossible to fix graphics and sound issues for my trouble and still couldn’t get the game I wanted to play to work.

I would think the difficulty inherent in supporting such things would readily explain their absence from standard DOSBox.

It seems the emulators that already are available just aren’t specialized enough to properly support classic Windows for gaming.

Aside from DOSBox-X, PCem (and 86box) are proving to be quite popular in that regard, and other tools such as dgVoodoo2 and Dxwnd are likewise improving steadily.

I guess we will just have to wait for better tools to be developed.

Peter Swinkels wrote on 2021-03-04, 21:55:

I guess we will just have to wait for better tools to be developed.

Did you bother to look at PCem at all? Maybe there won't be better tools developed if the current tools prove to be sufficiently adequate. There's only so much that can be done with old closed-source binaries. (The story goes that when Microsoft wanted to implement a compatibility mode in Windows 2000/XP, even they just had to resort to just sticking in a big glob of Win9x code rather than try to create something new that mimicked all the bugs and other quirks.)

But this doesn't have anything to do with imgmount anymore.

No, I didn't know about PCem.

And I am done with this topic.