Give me an R,
give me an E,
give me an A,
give me an D,
give me an M,
give me an E.

What do you have?
An README!!!

Big frigging hint: CTRL-F4 in readme.

I must admit that I was uncertain at first at how swapping disks worked in DOSBox. I was just more determined to figure it out on my own than ask. That ctrl-f4 is the switch was obvious from the README, but specifiying multiple filespecs in the MOUNT/IMGMOUNT commands was not. There is nothing I can see in the README to indicate multiple filespecs with those commands; both the syntax and examples don't mention it. Perhaps an additional example with multiple filespecs and a note about using ctrl-f4 to switch would defuse such confusion? Not being critical here, but making it a bit clearer in the README might be helpful for some.

Not being critical here

Who said imgmount works with multiple floppy images?

Who said anything about floppy images?

C'mon people... The atmosphere in this forum is getting more and more hostile in the last few months, and a lot of posts are not exactly helpful for beginners. I'm as much annoyed by "newbie posts" as anyone else, but we have to accept the readme is not the answer to every question, as it's not always 100% clear on every topic.

Anyways, back on topic. I've tried to install a game from floppy images some months ago, and i think switching with CTRL-F4 basically did work - the problem was that DOSBox was not reading the volume labels of the mounted images, if i recall correctly. Don't have the time to test that again, though.

The readme for 0.72 (Windows) talks explicitly about swapping CD-ROM images, not floppy images - it doesn't explicitly say that switching floppy images isn't possible, though. If you look at the readme, it seems quite obvious that switching floppy images should work as well. No matter whether switching floppies works or not - there's one important piece of info missing from the readme, and that's the lenght of the command line inside DOSBox, which is limited. If you want to use three or more images, and are stating the complete path to those, you run into that limit pretty fast (happened to me with Wing Commander III).

madcrow: do some searching on VOGONS, i think the topic has been covered in some posts. And/or just try it yourself - basically, you'd mount more than one image on the command line ("imgmount <image1> <image2> <image3>"), and then switch these with CTRL-F4 (you'll get some notification about the switching in the DOSBox console window). I'm not 100% sure about the correct imgmount syntax for floppy images, it could be neccessary to give additional params on the command line (see the DOSBox readme for details). You could also try to copy the image's contents to a single directory, mount that and install from there, this works for many games. Hope that helps a bit. Just play around with the command a bit, and report your findings here. I'm pretty sure you'll get additional help when you can ask specific questions, and/or give more detailed info (what you are trying to install, format of images, DOSBox version, host OS, etc.).

Who said anything about floppy images?

The OP (disk images).

If floppy disk images are in fact what the OP is working with, then there is the somewhat tedious method of mounting a folder as the A or B drive in DOSBox and using your OS to move the contents of the various disks into the folder when requested by the install program. Same trick can be done in the Windows command shell using SUBST for the A or B drive, but with DOSBox you need to hit Ctrl-F4 after "swapping disks" to clear the cache. This process works with most install programs; but if it looks for a different LABEL on each disk, I don't know of a way around that.

Yes, I'm sure this is obvious to many people, but probably not to everyone.

BTW, using an image utility program such as WinImage makes getting the files and directory structure out of disk images very easy, but one can also use IMGMOUNT in DOSBox to copy the stuff out somewhat more laboriously.

Thanks for thr tips. I managed to get the install done without too many problems...

http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/IMGMOUNT
I haven't really looked at it before
it does specifically say that you can use floppy images, with -t floppy after mount, like
mount D -t floppy C:\stuff\floppy.bin
or something like that

I haven't really looked at it before

Next time read the postings on this thread before posting some useless reply,
so you'd know this is not about mounting one floppy image.

Maybe there needs to be a seperate forum for newbie questions. And we could even sticky that forum out the yin-yang with answers to recurring threads like these. It seems clear that a good chuck of our new users seem unwilling to use the search functionality and search for the million other threads just like theirs in which their exact same question has been answered previously.

Any thoughts on this?

Of course maybe the best solution is to simply rewrite the readme file and adds lots of pictures and rework some of it in an effort to better allow for users to understand what is going on.

simply rewrite the readme file and adds lots of pictures

This is in the guides forum, but doubt anybody reads it anyways.

The pictorial guide to DOSBox has been loaded more than 200.000 times.

wd wrote:

general_vagueness wrote:

I haven't really looked at it before

Next time read the postings on this thread before posting some useless reply,
so you'd know this is not about mounting one floppy image.

I knew that, I was just demonstrating the most basic way I knew to mount a floppy image.

We were all newbies once
ideas along these lines
also, awesome avatar darkgamorck, did iD really put that in their video games? I only played Doom and Doom II

I was just demonstrating the most basic way I knew to mount a floppy image

Obviously the OP already knew it. But thanks for cluttering threads.

general_vagueness wrote:

also, awesome avatar darkgamorck, did iD really put that in their video games? I only played Doom and Doom II

Yeah. It's in Wolfenstein 3D. Just start the game and you'll see it in the series of intro screens leading up to the main menu.

wd wrote:

Obviously the OP already knew it. But thanks for cluttering threads.

sorry, dang, do you have to always respond like that when I try to help and don't know as much about the subject as you do?

Then reply only when you DO know about the topic (this includes reading the thread).