I have officially given up.......on my mac. Ive switched over to my crap ass windows which was probably a smarter thing to do in the first place. Got the drives mounted fine but still cant run the installer. I dir /w get the list, type in setup press enter, and it adds "win setup illegal command win" below it. Sorry to change directions but any clues?

That would mean that setup.exe is a Windows executable.

IF - that is a big IF - if this a late DOS / early Windows game, MAYBE there is a pure DOS installer somewhere on the CD. Maybe it is not called SETUP, but INSTALL. Maybe it is hidden somewhere in a sub-directory?

nope, install isnt a legal command either.

Is it a SETUP.EXE ?

yup. I tried inputting setup.exe as well but it didnt work either. There are actually three Setups: Setup.exe, Setup.ins, and Setup.pkg. If that helps at all.

windows game

The game is on the list of supported games on the DOSBox website and lists DOS 5.0 or higher in the manual.

yeah and you have something that consists of windows-only files