It seems my problem is that no TSR VESA program recognizes any vesa modes on my card except for vesatest.exe which lists many modes - yet the program packed with it vvesa.com - does not seem to do anything.

I have the latest drivers for my card released February of this year, and have specifically searched ati vesa programs on the web... no luck so far 😒

I have fixed my problem, and I'm posting this in case anyone comes across my post in the future with the same problem.

While the game repeatedly claimed there was no compatible vesa mode, that was a red herring - it was not the issue at all.

Ultimately I made a iso image of my 2 cd's, and placed them in the directory i installed to using the disc.bat file provided on these forums.

I then copied my daemon.exe file to the directory and wrote a batch file mounting the 1st discworld 2 disc to device 0. (daemon.exe -mount 0,"discworld21.iso")

I then call dosbox using the following line in my batch file:
"C:\Program Files\DOSBox-0.70\dosbox.exe" -conf "C:\pcgames\Games\disc2\dosbox.conf" -noconsole -exit -fullscreen

My dosbox.conf file in my game directory has the following lines added to it under autoexec:
--------------------------
mount c c:\
mount L L:\ -t cdrom -ioctl
c:
cd C:\pcgames\Games\disc2
dwb.exe
exit
---------------------------

L: happens to be my device 0 for daemon.

This effectively mounts my cd into dos box, and plays the game perfectly.

Now I just need to figure out how to easily switch to disc 2 when the time comes, and it will be all set, hehe.

Ehh... You know that DOSBox can mount ISO-images all by itself?

to mount CD2, mount it in Daemon and then press CTRL+F4 in dosbox (should refresh)

No, i did not know dosbox had a virtual drive built into it.

Or does it require daemon as well?

I'll check into the options.

regarding the idea for getting the second disc mounted - I am trying to get the batch and conf file to do everything for the user - so they don't have to have knowledge of dosbox. I can't mount the second disc to daemon until it actually calls for the disc - which the batch file will have no idea when that time comes.

If I mount it to a second virtual drive then he game won't find it, as it seems to be very specific about only checking one drive for the game.

Am i completely missing something?

If you want it all done by a batch file, read up on IMGMOUNT, it's a dosbox command to mount CD images (and you can mount several in one go and easily switch between them (also with CTRL-F4 if my memory serves me right))

Info should be in the readme

And best of all: The ReadMe file comes free with every purchase of DOSBox!

Nice idea, exclude the readme and SELL IT!!! Guess a lot more people
would actually read it then if they have paid for it 😀

Washes off all the sarcasm and reads up on IMGMOUNT

The stuff about switching images (ctrl-f4) was not in the readme. I only found it by searching google and an example appeared on some wing commander forums.

imagefile Location of the image files to mount in DOSBox. The location can be on a mounted drive inside DOSBox, or o […]
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imagefile
Location of the image files to mount in DOSBox. The location can
be on a mounted drive inside DOSBox, or on your real disk. It is
possible to mount CD-ROM images (ISOs or CUE/BIN) as well, if you
need CD swapping capabilities specify all images in succession.
The CDs can be swapped with CTRL-F4 at any time.

diskimgN.img This can be any number of floppy disk images one wants mounted after DOSBox boots the specified drive l […]
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diskimgN.img
This can be any number of floppy disk images one wants mounted after
DOSBox boots the specified drive letter.
To swap between images, hit CTRL-F4 to change from the current disk
to the next disk in the list. The list will loop back from the last
disk image to the beginning.

CTRL-F4 Change between mounted disk-images. Update directory cache for all drives!

So we have at least 3 hints.....

The middle quote is very indirect and confusing. There are no examples of a proper line in the readme which shows two iso images being mounted into memory.

The first one is (um yes some large example is missing).
But there's everything you need in the two sentences,
how you're supposed to specify the images, how to swap,
and everything at the entry for IMGMOUNT:

if you need CD swapping capabilities specify all images in succession.
The CDs can be swapped with CTRL-F4 at any time.

😀

I agree, it could be clearer. Just tried it with 4 BIN-images and ran into a nasty surprise. DOSBox could not handle my extremely long paths:

Z:\>imgmount D "C:\Spool\CD images\Wing Commander III\WC3_CD1.bin" "C:\Spool\CD images\Wing Commander III\WC3_CD2.bin" "C:\Spool\CD images\Wing Commander III\WC3_CD3.bin" "C:\Spool\CD images\Wing Commander III\WC3_CD4.bin" -t iso

After re-arranging the path, I succeeded with

Z:\>imgmount D "WC3_CD1.bin" "WC3_CD2.bin" "WC3_CD3.bin" "WC3_CD4.bin" -t iso

Pressing CTRL-F4 now walks me through each of the images, while the DOSBox status window reports

Drive D: diisk 2 of 4 now active
Drive D: diisk 3 of 4 now active
Drive D: diisk 4 of 4 now active
Drive D: diisk 1 of 4 now active

P.S. I also managed to crash DBGL with the long paths 😉

Remember those are parameters to a dos program (imgmount.exe).