This is not possible as dosbox does not emulate atapi ports.

You don't need a CD-ROM driver in DOSBox. Use the imgmount/mount commands to mount either a image file or a directory as a virtual CD. See the README.TXT file in the DOSBox directory for instructions.

imgmount doesn't work when booting msdos inside dosbox.

Thanks for the reply, I guess it would explain why none of my tricks worked 😉

I guess I can try to use fakecd or something through the booted DOS, but currently this is too much of a hassle for the one game I wanted to test...

bochs supports atapi just fine (that oak cdrom driver should work)

Sorry, didn't know that CD-emulation will not work with MSDOS.

Btw, Bochs is _very_ slow, IMHO. I had much better results with QEMu.

Yes if you got some hd-image they should be interchangable. Qemu uses
several bochs devices iirc

!!! Hot !!! Hot !!! Hot !!!

If you are on Linux and have a legal windows 2000/xp version
you can try out Qemu with win 2000/xp as guest system, use the kernel-kqemu acceleration module and install vdm-sound in your virtual machine. Now that's fast ..., at least for the games that are comaptible with vdm-sound.

But don't complain that duke3d is slow that way...

wd wrote:

This is not possible as dosbox does not emulate atapi ports.

I know you aren't trying to go this route, but would it be possable to add basic ATAPI support in the future? As far as interface goes, I could see just a simple alteration to the MOUNT & IMGMOUNT command (would all have to be run before the BOOT command, if I remember how to boot to a HDD image correctly.) Instead of mounting to a drive letter (MOUNT C: ....) you would mount to a number from 1 to 4 (Mount 1 ...) or maybe more. Other than that, it would be pretty much the same. This would allow you to mount HDD images, ISO images, or physical CD-Rom devices to ATAPI ports. 1-4 would be Primary Master, Primary Slave, Secondary Master, & Secondary Slave (or maybe 0-3, whatever.)

I like the idea of setting up a HDD image and putting all the games & apps that don't require slowing things down drastically on that image. But I don't really like the idea that you lose CD-Rom access, or the ability to change images on the fly (without knowing exactly which images & in which order you want them in advance.) Plus, IIRC, the only images you can mount would be floppy images anyways. The problem with the last part is that I just cannot think of a way to do it without adding another window or interface. Or allowing commands to be typed into the console window. Plus, some of the OSes DOSBox is written for would have problems switching to/from this extra interface. No, better to have the mounts before boot just going to physical drives (floppy/CD-Rom,) or HDD image files.

iirc, there are CD emulation programs for MS-DOS where you can mount a CD image. I've never tried them personally.

I think eventually we may see ATAPI support in DosBox but it's nowhere near a priority. There's nothing stopping someone from creating a patch to add the feature though.

You don't need to change any interfaces, think it would be enough to "just"
emulate the atapi ports and bind that to imgmount (you can already specify
drive numbers instead of letters, especially when partitioning raw harddisk
images).
I have no idea how sensitive the timing is for atapi commands/transfers,
this might create problems.

Indeed, SHSUCDHD is really all you need, no? You can use that to mount an ISO image as a virtual CD-ROM from DOS 6.22.

http://www.geocities.com/jadoxa/shsucdx/

Maybe it's easier (than adding ATAPI interfaces) to produce a special DOS executable which will install mscdex interrupt handlers to point to dosbox mscdex callbacks in similar manner to usal dosbox behavior ( and also be a frontend app which will use callbacks provided to do image mounting).

mscdex acts (additionally) as block device driver so simply redirecting
mscdex calls doesn't work.

(Why would someone want to install MS-DOS 6.22 under DOSBox these days anyway?)

What other options are there? Why "these days"?

Doesn't DOSBox generally run everything just fine on its own? I would think that anything that would require DOS 6.22 would also require the more sophisticated emulation of VMWare or QEMU or whatever as well.

(disclaimer: I probably don't know what I'm talking about in this post 😊)
I was thinking not about mounting host fs directory as a cdrom, but for reading image data which can be copied to block device buffer by dosbox. It could be also simpler to do that just by replacing cdrom driver (one loaded in config.sys) with a stub one. OTOH it could end up being not much easier as implementing atapi ports (but, I started looking at Bochs IDE code once but was discouraged by it's size 😖 )