Hey, don't give up so quickly! (; I see that "CD not found" error message. There's one more thing you could try, and that's to make an image of the CD, and try mounting that in DOSBox with the imgmount command. Right now, you're using the "mount" command to mount a subdirectory as a "fake" cd drive. Even when you've mounted your "real" CD-ROM drive, it was treated as a directory by DOSBox. Mounting an image works differently, and could make a difference for copy-protected games.

Do you know how to make an image of a CD in ISO or BIN/CUE format? you could do that with programs like Alcohol 120%, IsoBuster or CDRWin. If the game has audio tracks (which is not very probable in this case), you'd have to create a BIN/CUE image, if it has only the data on it, an ISO image would be fine.

After you have the image on your hd, you'd mount it like this:
imgmount d: <path_and_filename_of_image> -t iso -ioctl

If you've created a BIN/CUE image, you have to use the CUE filename to mount the image.

And then you can try to start the game again.

I have an idea why the MODE.BAT trick didn't work. Unlike a real program, I think BAT-files needs to be CALL'ed if they have to return to the caller (the GO.BAT on the CD). And since that GO.BAT is on the CD it will be difficult to change! 🙁

Let me check it...

Another option, somewhat like the one ADDiCT suggests, is to copy everything on the CD onto your hard-drive. I think you tried that before, right?

But how did you mount the fake CD? Did you remember the -t cdrom option? E.g. create a directory, C:\FakeCD, and copy the CD to FakeCD.

Edit the GO.BAT in FakeCD and remove the mode command (or turn it into a REM-ark by adding the REM in front of mode).

Then mount the FakeCD in DOSBox as if it was a real CD:

mount D C:\FakeCD -t cdrom

And since you have removed/rem'ed the call to mode you don't have to create MODE.BAT, and you don't need to set PATH either.

Another hint: Some games identify their CDs by label. You should check out the -label option to the mount command (it's in the README I believe). This might make image-mounting unnecessary.

Though in the end image creation (cue/bin or iso) and image-mounting is the most compatible method if the game does unusual stuff, such as reading outside of files on the CD.

MiniMax wrote:

I have an idea why the MODE.BAT trick didn't work. Unlike a real program, I think BAT-files needs to be CALL'ed if they have to return to the caller (the GO.BAT on the CD). And since that GO.BAT is on the CD it will be difficult to change! 🙁

Let me check it...

Yep 😒 Unless a BAT-file is CALL'ed it will never return. So the MODE.BAT thing will not work.

MiniMax wrote:

Yep 😒 Unless a BAT-file is CALL'ed it will never return. So the MODE.BAT thing will not work.

You could use a zero byte .COM file. Just create a "New Text File" from the Windows context menu, then rename it to MODE.COM (ignore the complaint by Windows about the file becoming unusable). Such files do nothing and return directly to the caller.

This won't help the OP it seems, just pointing it out.

Yep! That works. Maybe it will work??

i'm not sure if dosbox likes zero byte files. I think we have a protection mechanism in for that.

Well just delete that whole mode thing, "mode co80" just clears the
screen so it shouldn't hurt the cdrom detection.

I had the chance to try out the game. It seems to have a copy protection scheme that DOSBox can't handle (yet). The game says it can't find the CD, not matter how it is mounted.

I tried to find a no-cd fix for that game, but couldn't find anything, which essentialy means this game is currently not playable in DOSBox. Qbix/wd: if you're interested in checking out the protection scheme for a possible fix to DOSBox, just PM me.

To clear up some of the confusion: when starting the game, it tries to execute the "mode" command, which doesn't work, of course. Right after that command, it tries to start the game's main executable, which fails with the "CD not found - terminating" error message. It looks like these two error messages are somehow connected, but i don't think that's the case.

ADDiCT wrote:

I had the chance to try out the game. It seems to have a copy protection scheme that DOSBox can't handle (yet). The game says it can't find the CD, not matter how it is mounted.

I tried to find a no-cd fix for that game, but couldn't find anything, which essentialy means this game is currently not playable in DOSBox. Qbix/wd: if you're interested in checking out the protection scheme for a possible fix to DOSBox, just PM me.

To clear up some of the confusion: when starting the game, it tries to execute the "mode" command, which doesn't work, of course. Right after that command, it tries to start the game's main executable, which fails with the "CD not found - terminating" error message. It looks like these two error messages are somehow connected, but i don't think that's the case.

That's my idea to. No matter what I try, the game just won't work with dosbox. I remember that when I played it in 'normal' dos, that the game also would give some difficulty sometimes.

But thanks for all the help guys!

I apreciate it very much 😀

They open a file on the cd which is marked hidden, this fails in dosbox as
file attributes are not supported (besides directory and cdrom->readonly).
ISO specs have a flag for the hidden attribute, so it might be possible to
get it working at least for disk images.

Qbix wrote:

i'm not sure if dosbox likes zero byte files. I think we have a protection mechanism in for that.

Nope - works just fine 😉

Well "working" isn't the right word. There should be some error message
in the console window iirc., as somewhen a guy had a broken executable.

No - no message.

Right, guess the argument was "if they do shit like executing zero-byte files they're off anyways" 😉

1		if (len==0) {
2			/* Prevent executing zero byte files */
3			DOS_SetError(DOSERR_ACCESS_DENIED);
4			DOS_CloseFile(fhandle);
5			return false;
6		}

Well if zero byte .COM files are a no-no you could always use a one-byte file (RET) or a two-byte file (INT 20).

Well deleting a line of a batch file is maybe easier.....

wd wrote:

Well deleting a line of a batch file is maybe easier.....

Absolutely, as long as it isn't on a read-only medium.

But I admit this discussion is... um... a bit pointless.

Nah, the point was just to try to avoid zero-byte executables 😉

The problem (cdrom check) is fixed in the cvs btw.

Cool! Gonna check this when a new AEP CVS build is available... wd, do i have to mount a ISO of the game, or can i copy the CD's contents to a directory, and mount from there?

Edit: nevermind, i read in the changelog that it's only working on ISO images. The game still stops with an error message with "dosbox_15.06.2007.exe" from AEP, will try it again with a later build.