😀

😁

And if you want a precise reply right away instead of a 20-replies thread,
you should start off posting exact problem reports, and answer questions
instead of accusating others for being nasty to you.

Well, Im sorry if that is frustrating, Ill just reiterate that you said:

And you can't save files? Wow.

now, Ill just say that, and that Im willing to apologize, forgive, and forget, we all can learn from that, Ill be careful about what people say, and in the future we wont have this problem! 😁

That reply was AFTER you not answering the questions posted earlier
(like if you're on vista, which alone would have led to an easy solution).

Another victim of UAC.

That reply was AFTER you not answering the questions posted earlier
(like if you're on vista, which alone would have led to an easy solution).

as I said, I'm dropping it, I'm sorry if I've offended you because of it, but i believe we aren't serving good discussion here, so I'll apologize to the whole community for this argument.

No reason to apologize, hope you learned the one or other thing so it's fine.

The real problem here (and in many other threads here - and in the real world), is that many people is incapable of simplifying, incapable of doing simple diagnostics, and (which is perhaps the root case of both problems), incapable of believing that they themselves are doing something wrong, or might have misunderstood the whole problem.

Not picking on you casobs2, but in your case, with that mysterious joystick command popping up, my first reaction would be to try to identify EXACTLY where it came from. I would NOT want to remove it, I would NOT want to fix it, I would simply want to know WHERE it came from, and secondly, WHY DOSBox thought it was a good idea to try executing the command.

I would (per my first post in this thread) use the Status Window and the information there to locate what config file was being loaded. And then I would rename it, restart DOSBox, and see the joystick command was still being executed. If the command was still being executed, I would move that damned config file to the desktop hoping that DOSBox would not see it. If that didn't help, I might get desperate and move it to an USB stick, and physically remove the USB-stick before trying again. Now, if that friking joystick command still showed up, I would start looking for any other files named *dosbox* or *conf* or even contained the word 'joystick'. One by one, I would rename/move/transfer those files out of the way until I found the culprit.

There is only one goal here: Identify where the hell that joystick command came from.

Hopefully I would eventually find the correct file, and only then would I worry about getting rid of the joystick command. Now, if editing & saving the file with Notepad did not work, I would again go back to basics: Can I create a new file? Can I create a new file in the same directory as this un-editable config file? Can I copy it to my desktop, edit it there, and copy it back to the original location? Can I copy it to some other program folder, like the folder where I have Firefox installed?

Hopefully, somewhere along the testing, I would realize that this has nothing to with DOSBox, it is something about my PC, my operating system, and what I can do with program folders. And by then, if I could not solve that permission problem, I would NOT ask in a forum about old games. I would ask in a forum with people that is clever about my operating system. Hopefully, these OS-clever people would help me understand the cause of the editing/saving issue, and I would be able to remove that damn joystick command from my dosbox.conf file.

And then I could get on with solving the original problem - if it still existed.

Solving the problem might mean editing the file. Might mean saving it as an empty file. And then slowly adding 10-20 of the original contents to the file, restart DOSBox, see what happens, add 10-20 more lines, restart, add more lines, until I had a better understanding of which lines did what. Somewhere along that path of discovery, I am fairly sure I would get to that "Dooh!!" moment where I would slap myself in the head and say "Silly me - that I why! I did XXXX wrong". And I would be a wiser man.

If, despite all my efforts, I failed to identify the cause of the problem, then I at least could describe to my fellow forum members 1) What I had tried, 2) Why I had tried it, and 3) What effects it had had - or not had. And then the solution would have come much quicker.

Thank you for your thorough explanation of how to look at the issue and look at the various way to tackle the issue. Ill be sure to remember that next time I have a problem like this. Your right I could have handle it differently, and like you said, I'll be wiser next time. I was pretty frustrated and I believe that caused me not to look at the root problem the way you would have, but with this in mind, Ill be sure to make sure that all these possibilities are addressed in the future, thank you again. And I know you aren't picking on me, Ill admit, I'm a newb and have a lot to learn about dosbox in general. Right now I use it just to play one of my favourite games of all time, but perhaps in the future Ill play other, and Ill be sure to read this forum before tackling those future issue.