.
.
.
<WARNING: Sarcasm included, if you are easily offended, please read Harry Poter instead>

This isn't about a default configuration file, or if the default driver letter will be C: or Z:, or even a default mounted directory...

I think, what it comes down to, is that the developers just hate people who don't read the readme file. Thats plain racism 😁

.
.
.
i've got an idea... once dosbox starts, it will display a password prompt (Enter README Password), and the password will, ofcourse, be in the readme file!! at the very middle, hidden within the text. i'm sure that way everyone will be forced to read the readme file.

even better, force them to MEMORIZE the entire readme!! yes! and then every time dosbox starts, the user will have to type it (ofcourse we disable the "paste" command, just in case the user wants to cheat...).

just jocking 😀 😀

I hate jocks.

As someone who grew up with DOS and was able to use DOSBox rather easily, you guys are all being a bunch of elitist pricks that reenforce the stereotype of an old school computer geek. This software is almost purposefully cryptic. Its as if you WANT as little people as possible to use it. I read a book many moons ago call "The Frozen Keyboard". Its about bad software. DOSBox makes every mistake in usability possible.

And instead of saying, "you know it IS cryptic and painful for people who don't want a whole new hobby of learning not just DOS, but DOSBox itself. Maybe they just want to play some games they remember or are too young to have had a chance to experience." Instead you ridicule their laziness and tell them you'll help them on a help forum only if they pay you. Jesus. Get a life and get off this board if you aren't interested in helping people with reasonable confusions. Oy vey iz mir!

They can probably get away with bad software engineering by saying "oh, it's free software, what did you expect?" Ofcourse it's still bad software practices...

What annoys me, is their attitude. Instead of admitting that dosbox is very unfriendly and usability is non existant, they just go about bitching that they won't help people who don't read the readme file.

pricks indeed.

reminds me if the phpBB authors (all 6 of them) who say that anyone can contribute on phpBB but they don't allow anyone else to join their team of 6. Thus keeping development to themselfs. Ofcourse phpBB hasn't had a single new feature for 2 years now, since those 6 don't code anymore and they don't allow others to code for phpBB...

it also reminds me of the GAIM people, who again code another open source project, but you can't submit a patch or ask for a feature request if the author (that is, 1 author) doesn't really like it for his personal needs. Another one who hides behind the "its free software" excuse.

I believe there are countless of ANAL open source developers out there... some of them are in dosbox.... not much we can do about it... dosbox is all we have.

I wonder what language you are reading, or if you look at what happens here, or if you read anything at all.

Where does anyone say she'll help for money only?

What part of "This project is about correct emulation, _frontends_ are about usability" didn't you understand? As long as the emulation isn't good enough, the authors of DOSBox choose to leave usability issues to other volunteers (who do a great job at that).

And what does all that have to do with inactive projects? DOSBox is highly active, people submit amazing new developments every month, volunteers create ready-to-use binaries with those enhancements - I don't get what you want to say.

And why is it so difficult to read the README? If you ask here, you have to search the forums - and read. If you don't find your answer, you are going to ask - and read again. So there is no way around the "reading" part. Why on earth must other people repeat things for you that have been written countless times? People who show that they respect the voluntary work of the people in here by reading/searching, and only asking after that are helped with a great amount of patience.

Did you notice the word "voluntary" somewhere in my reply? I'm speaking about tens, if not hundreds of people helping out, each one with what he or she knows. Some people call it a community, and yes, in order to get something from a community, you have to play by their rules, just as it is in real life. Nowhere in life you are getting a free lunch. Is just a tiny bit of RESPECT for the time and work of others already too much? That's all you need to show, really.

BTW, if you dislike the usabliity, go ahead and send patches. I myself do that all the time - I dislike something in DOSBox, fix it and send a patch. If you don't know how to program, get someone else to do it. You probably know this is easier with "pretty please?" and "Oh, I offer to write some documentation/translation/... in return" instead of "you, stupid prick, read my mind and do what I think". You think basic social skills are missing here? Sure, I clearly see some people with a lack.

`Moe` wrote:

And why is it so difficult to read the README? If you ask here, you have to search the forums - and read. If you don't find your answer, you are going to ask - and read again. So there is no way around the "reading" part. Why on earth must other people repeat things for you that have been written countless times?

That exactly why we are doing this discussion. WE DON'T WANT TO READ.

A software application should be intuitive enough so as the user doesn't need to do any of the following:

1) read the readme
2) read 10KB of documentation
3) search a forum for 2 hours
4) register in the forum and ask question which couldn't find in the above
5) read->post->read->post etc etc in order to understand...

No my friend, a user should be just a user:

you buy a car...
you unlock the car
get in
start the car
you drive the car...

get it? no reading... no forums...

once the user goes for help, the software has failed him one way or another. for the simple tasks anyway. with dosbox, the user can't even do the simple action of starting dosbox, why? oh because read the readme.... it says you need to create a configuration file... oh come on.... why not generate a config file by default?

may i just add, that if we had to read the readme, read endless documentation and join a forum FOR EVERY APPLICATION WE USE... jesus christ!!! the world has gone mad 😀

In most cases you just have to read what dosbox writes when starting
up (things about mount), it's a few lines that are not complicated to
understand.
Thus it should be possible even for people who don't know DOS
(but why the hell would they want to play DOS games then anyways)
to start a game within 5 minutes. The same amount of time some
people need to unlock their car.

You will NEVER get in ANY easier, keep in mind that the targed
operating is DOS and not a car.....

You got your driving licence without reading? 😁

I'd like to know how you'd ever figure out the optimal PSI on your car tires.....what kind of oil your car uses.....or the rules of the road that you need to know to drive your car depending on the area that you are in.........all without reading.....

If you don't want to read then go back a couple hundred years in time and I'm sure they'd welcome you with open arms.....

Which brings me to this choice family guy quote:

(Flashback to a school in what looks like Pilgrim times. A girl gives an answer to a math question.)
Teacher: That's correct. A girl answered a math problem. You know what that means. A WITCH!"
Kids: WITCH! WITCH! WITCH! WITCH!

If I were running dosbox or had the inclinaton to fork, I would have a default config. Generating the config is an unnecesary step.

The PSI in my tires and the oil? Most people pay $18 bucks a year to have that done while their tires are rotated. Do you suggest they rotate their own tires as well?

I think the VCR parallel is perfect. The VCR was a horrible system that would have to be reset constantly everytime the power went out (no one EVER thought of putting a little battery in for the clock?). The programming of it was tedious and at times confusing resulting in the wrong program being taped. My mother was afraid of the VCR.

Now comes DVR and it just works. After 20 years a system (based on VCR+) has finally been created that even my mother can use.

What does this have to do with DOSBox? DOSBox is an emulator for games. Just games. Its not a scientific intrument or a 3d CAD program (although god knows those could be more user freindly too) its a game emulator and it should just work easily.

I said something similar before. Personally, I think it'd be nice if users didn't need to read the readme. Most people will try an application first and will resort to reading the readme after failing -- it's a mildly painful experience for me personally. If people didn't have to read the readme -- which is absolutely possible (come on, use your imagination) -- that would be nice... but it does take work, and possible maintenance. It's hard. The users are indebted to the authors nevertheless and the authors deserve a heap of credit, but usability difficulties are a hurdle to overcome.

If frontends are the way to go, then I guess it's best to link them to the project as much as possible for visibility. Maybe it's even best to recommend downloading the frontend as the usual way of using dosbox -- advanced users will know it's not really needed anyway, and can make a choice (vice versa is not the case, so this would be a pragmatic solution). Maybe the page is already set up that way. I don't use them, so I don't know. Packaging a dosbox+frontend download together is another option that I assume most people would summarily rule out due to usual emulator culture. My prediction is that this would resolve more problems than it would cause, and there would be an increase in badly-written help request posts anyway due to it becoming more accessible to the least patient users.

Edit: I feel stupid posting in this thread. For ongoing discussion, I wish the title was a bit less negative and talked about usability or something.. rather than the sensationalistic "hatred of dosbox" bit.

augnober, you are right, it would be nice if people wouldn't have to read. But with DOS, there are some "but"s.

sehh, please realize DOS is not a single emulator hardware which was sold exactly the same everywhere. Even a general-purpose computer like the Amiga was at least partly "the same everywhere". PCs simply have not been since 1985, and will never be. There is absolutely no way around some tinkering, as there are things that simply cannot be autodetected. DOSBox is an expert tool, and as with every exper tool, you can do lots more than with a dumb tool, but you have to learn (i.e., read).

Which is not to say that we're already doing the best we can. No, there's always room for improvement. Yet, the core developers concentrate on correctness. They don't ignore usability, but they think other things are more important. If they didn't, you'd not be here today: I have tried countless emulators, and none of them ran so many games flawlessly. Their focus on emulation and not usability is the reason why DOSBox is so cool.

If I used windows, I would have downloaded the nullsoft installer suite, read (uh-oh, that bad word again) the manual and created a better installer than the current one. You don't need to program to do that. Go out and do it, for the sake of all new users. Funnily, few who complain about how bad things are help at making things better. I'm not on windows, so I don't care. I am working on improving DOSBox usability elsewhere, matching my programming skills and my personal needs.

In any case open source means "if it bothers you, fix it". So instead of complaining, do something. You can - everyone can help.

Reading through the thread, I can't see much I disagree with. I think any argument here is mostly due to misunderstanding, and the real discussion is about the possibilities of how to proceed going forward. I mostly tend to disagree with the following elements within replies: 1) implication that the users should do research and work because it will either improve some kind of karma balance between them and the authors, or because it's some way for them to mature. This argument seems irrational and immature to me, and entirely missing the point. 2) implication that it's impossible to improve things. This is an extraordinary claim which is difficult to prove (ie. famous last words). Thankfully, most replies don't fall into those categories much.. just mostly misunderstanding perhaps.

Anyway.. since DOSBox mostly achieves host independence, it is in theory possible for application-specific configurations to be shared between end-users, and hence possible for the tweaking process to be offloaded from the masses. This actually makes it so the most user-friendly solution is potentially much better than the situation that existed back in the real dos days. I don't see this as a DOSBox-specific task -- really, the main thing that would need to be given for each app is the specification of an original target platform. This would address the issue of PC's being different from one another, as this would tell DOSBox precisely which system to emulate. Beyond that, there'd be the usual host-too-slow and/or driver problems. It's possible, though somewhat difficult, to automatically supply users with error messages to help troubleshoot (or give up on) these issues too. Anyway, I'll reiterate that it's in theory possible to fix a lot to damn near perfection... it's just a pain and has drawbacks in practice due to maintenance, different focus of effort, etc. .. and as Moe mentioned, not the focus of DOSBox at this time (-- primarily support for the games. otherwise, there's no point in any of this).

Some of this is irrelevant to me though. I think what most users expect is a pulldown menu to adjust some important configurable settings, or equivalent GUI functionality of that sort (such as an osd). I presume the lack of this is what gives some people a real shock.

Anyway, regardless, some additions for user/newbiefriendliness would be for frontends, some for dosbox patches that would probably remain unofficial for a while. A target-description config thing could be made by anyone and put up anywhere -- it would just require describing the specs of games, preferably in an easily-processible/reprocessible format. Lots of possibilities, all requiring effort if that's chosen to be the way to go, and some with drawbacks as well.

Yeah, I'm slowly converting forum messages into FAQ's for the DosBox FAQ thread. That should help out tremendously with DosBox problems.....eventually when it's done we should integrate the FAQ into the DosBox readme with the other FAQ's......of course people will have to read the README to read the FAQ's....which they won't do first so they'll post here instead.....where we'll just point them to the DosBox FAQ thread instead! 😀

It's been stated by Moe that configurations between games are not that significant so game specific configuration files really aren't that big of a deal. I haven't done much research into it myself but if we just went down say the Top #100 DOS games that people play on the forums and then provide the "best" DosBox configuration for each one then that should make the newbies happy.

Now if they would only actually read the README or a FAQ. One thing that could help if there was a menu, there could be a help file. On Windows, the README and/or FAQ could be compiled into a CHM or HLP file, accessible from a menu bar. A menu could also allow for things like mounting a drive with a GUI, complete with a browse button.

Until then, as was suggested earlier, if the installer included one of the existing GUIs, it might help with some of the newbie confusion. It would probably need to have the installer place a shortcut on the desktop that the user would use to launch DOSBox, via the frontend.

Again you are all missing the point of this discussion.

Instead of writting FAQ's and README's, you should make dosbox easier to use.

sehh wrote:

Again you are all missing the point of this discussion.

Instead of writting FAQ's and README's, you should make dosbox easier to use.

So you keep saying, but such thing is easy to say. What about some suggestions instead of how to make DOSBox easier to use?

I've said it many times before, others have said it as well. This thread is 5 pages long of people giving suggestions.

Ofcourse the first suggestion we made was to include (or generate) a default configuration with the distribution.

Make dosbox full screen by default so it acts in a way that most people expect it to.

Also have some default path for the C: drive or map available real drives when the default config is generated. Each achritecture can have some default directory (home directory for *nix systems) or some /games/ path under home.

You can even use a ~/.dosbox/ directory like most other applications and store a default games directory along with the default configuration under it.

There are LOADS of other suggestions already posted in this thread as well as other threads in the forum.

Its like, you are offering a defective car and you focus on after-sales service. Instead, you should offer a user friendly and reliable car which eliminates after-sales service (or minimizes it).

but wait... that won't force users to read the README right? sorry my bad.. forget about my suggestions...