On my harddrive there is one, but it is not functionality that is needed for games. So there is no reason to add it to the official DOSBox tree, as our focus is games.

The other window can be hidden if you check the shortcuts that are placed in the start menu.

Some of the programs I want to run are games, and in fact there are many text-based games for which this feature would be very, very useful. Could the code be added to the tree?

Also, I am not sure what you mean by "shortcuts that are placed in the start menu." Do you mean to make a shortcut which starts the program "minimized?" I could do this, but would still wind up with a window that would appear in the dock and when I used Alt-Tab to switch between programs. Ideally, would like to put something in the .conf file to tell the program not to display the window at all.

You can place something in the shortcut that prevents the status console. Look in the readme.

Search for copy/paste, there is a workaround by emendelson that you can use

And do text based gamesneed more than short keywords?

Found the -noconsole command line argument in the readme file. Thank you!

Also found a message from emendelson at An AppleScript to paste the OS X clipboard into DOSBox. Unfortunately, it's for the Mac and won't work on Windows. Also, it only pastes; it does not copy. Is there another workaround that might let me both copy and paste?

Actually, some text-based programs can require long sequences of commands to get you back to a known state. This is true of text-based "adventure" games in particular. But in general, being able to copy and paste text has been a capability of every "DOS box" I have ever seen. The Windows 3.0 DOS box had it, and it was available even before that in DESQview (which I used to run many years ago on my DOS machines). It just makes sense to be able to copy text out of the window and paste some back in (in many implementations, it just goes into the BIOS keyboard buffer or whatever code is emulating it).

Search again, he made one for windows, too. Perhaps only pastes, too though

Yes, every command prompt had it, but you could never do it in pure dos and osbox is ados emulator not a command prompt one.

Maybe I am typing the wrong thing, but I have searched using the terms "copy", "paste", and "emendelson" and cannot find anything for Windows.

I know that the Windows GUI makes it fairly easy to inject keystroke events into a process (it can be done pretty easily in VB, for example). But you'd have to fire up a separate app to do it! It would be better to make this something one could invoke from the menu that drops down from the icon at the upper left of the window, just as one can "mark" and "paste" in the Windows DOS box.

By the way, it was possible to cut and paste in "pure" DOS if you invoked Microsoft's multitasker. (It doesn't make sense unless you have more than one program running.) I believe that this was introduced in MS-DOS 6 or 7. Digital Research did the same thing in DR-DOS.

Just go through emendelsons posts. And yes, it might be easier to do this in dosbox itself but I found for myself, playing games I don't need to copy from dosbox at all an rarely wish to paste in it.

You may not need it, but then you may play different games than me. I am wondering if the existing code could be put into the tree for those of us who could use it.

But what do you really need it for? So far the only reason you gave were text based games and the long sequences it needs to get back the game state. For that you just need paste. Emendelsons app does that.

I also capture text OUT of DOS windows... including program registration information and other such things. (And I still have not been able to find that app; I have been looking). It seems to me that since the code has been written it ought to be in the tree. Why not?

Qbix gave the answer.
How many times do you need to capture registration info? Maybe you are better off with Virtualbox + some Windows and in that run the games on the command prompt

And it is really easy finding the app by going through emendelsons posts. Five seconds

I was really hoping to run a simple emulator rather than a hypervisor, which hogs both memory and CPU and isn't going to be good for real time programs. Which is probably the same reason you run DOSBox rather than just using a VM also.

As for looking for the posts: I tried typing "emendelson" into the search box but it did not turn up. No better luck with various keywords. FINALLY found them when I discovered the OTHER search mechanism in your message board software.

It worked OK in an initial test (need to try it with long sequences), but it's one way. I would like to be able to copy blocks OUT of a window as well. (Could also use scrollback so I could review a game and do copies of more than a screen of text.)

It's just the question whether you can jsut use the big virtualizers to do whatever you need to capture and thenuse this information inside dosbox. If need be you could try the screenshot feature of dosbox and an ocr program 😉
You could have found it easily by cfinding any post by emendelson, clicking on his name and then let the forum show you all his posts. Works this way in almost all forums.

Oh and even on the command prompt you can only copy text that is written on the prompt and not much more. Maybe textedit...

brettglass wrote:

(Could also use scrollback so I could review a game and do copies of more than a screen of text.)

DOSBox's CLI isn't a console window like CMD, it's an emulated CGA/EGA/VGA display. You don't have scrollback in real DOS, so you don't have it in DOSBox.

If you want to do text based adventure games, you could use an interpreter like Frotz if they're based on the Infocom Z-Machine engine. These would likely support the copy-paste functions you want.