For those not aware, I'm getting closer to making Duke Nukem 3D (Dos) over today's internet a reality. and one emulated OS I want to test on is DOSBOX.

Right now I'm trying to make a script where a 3rd party program launches my script with a special file as a parameter which in turn runs DOSBOX. However I want my script to set the ultimate folder for the game but that's where I have difficulty.

This is my setup so far:

My script to launch DOSBOX:

1#!/bin/bash
2folder="/path/to/every/thing"
3if [ -z "$1" ]
4then
5echo "file as parameter required"
6else
7if [ -r "$1" ]
8then
9echo "Preparing duke nukem...."
10echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
11kill -9 $(pidof socat) > /dev/null
12kill -9 $(pidof slattach) > /dev/null
13kill -9 $(pidof dosbox) > /dev/null
14killall socat > /dev/null
15killall slattach > /dev/null
16killall dosbox > /dev/null
17socat -4 PTY,link="/tmp/dbnet",raw,echo=0 TCP4-LISTEN:8001 &
18sleep 1
19slattach -L -s 115200 -p slip "/tmp/dbnet" &
20sleep 1
21ifconfig sl0 192.168.7.1 dstaddr 192.168.7.2 netmask 255.255.255.252 mtu 1500 txqueuelen 1500 up
22#iptables -t nat -F
23iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.7.0/30 -j MASQUERADE
24dosbox -conf "$folder/dosbox.conf" -c "set DNU=$(cat $1)" -c "mount C: $folder"
25sleep 1
26kill -9 $(pidof slattach) > /dev/null
27kill -9 $(pidof socat) > /dev/null
28else
29echo "Parameter needs to be a valid file"
30fi
31fi

and this is the dosbox config file thats in the correct folder for its autoexec.bat

1@echo off
2@echo Running Duke Nukem in DOSBOX networking style....
3C:
4ethersl -p 0x60 -h 3 0x2F8 1152000
5commit.com

In DOSBOX, when I run the SET command, the DNU variable value is correct, but dosbox wants to execute its autoexec.bat (shown above) before it mounts the C drive, but because the mount operation requires the working program folder and I want the working program folder only defined in the script itself (not in dosbox config file), I feel my only solution is to run all my commands as -c parameters when running DOSBOX, and that would be one heck of a long line to be passing to a command when I could do it in autoexec.bat?

The only kind of solution I could think of is throw all my other startup stuff in a separate batch file and try running that instead?

But is there a better solution? I want my setup to eventually work with as many OS's (including windows 10) as possible.

I added an attachment that shows my DOSBOX output: