I apologize if this has been answered before. I spent a good bit of time looking for the answer but couldn't find it.

->readme->mapper

Thanks. I did read that section several times, but didn't see anything that addressed the question. Well, sometimes things just don't work out. Have a great day.

Then you didn't read (or at least understand) properly. That section does mention how to do it. Let me spell it out for you: When you start the keymapper, all the custom DOSBox functions are in the area at the bottom right. "ShutDown", "Cap Mouse", etc. With the exception of "Fullscreen" and "Pause", they all use the F-keys. You can tell when clicking on one of them, because at the lower end of the screen, the binding comes up, like "BIND:Key f9" with "mod1" enabled (by default, mod1 = ctrl, mod2 = alt, mod3 = undefined).

By removing the mapping for each of the built-in functions, the key combinations become available to the program running inside DOSBox.

Note that if you remove the key combo for the mapper, you won't be able to restart the mapper again unless you start DOSBox with the -startmapper argument on the command line. If there's no keys bound to the other functions, they too will of course be unavailable.

Thanks very much, Kippesoep. Yes, I'm sure it's my fault that I didn't understand the README. But your explanation is clear. Thanks very much.

Could I reassign one of the built-in functions to a double-modified function key, such as CTL-ALT-F9, or SHIFT-CTL-F9?

Thanks again for taking the time to explain this.

try it

Ok, I think I am up and running. Thanks for the help.

Two questions remain. The first is whether there's a way to paste plain text from the Windows clipboard into the application running in DOSBox, such as by stuffing the emulated keyboard queue. I found a thread on this from June, 2008, and it looked like the answer was no, but I wondered if anything had changed since then. I see that the status window does allow pasting, but the window the application is running in appears not to.

Second, in the shortcut that calls DOSBox, I know you can add the [name] of an executable, and DOSBox will mount that directory as C: and run the executable. But is it possible to also include a command line entry for the executable in the shortcut. I tried doing that several different ways, but couldn't find a quote mark arrangement that would work. If it matters, the additional command line entry would be the name of a text file. So I'm trying to do something like this, but I can't make it work:

C:\progra~1\dosbox\dosbox.exe c:\progra~1\ezq\ezq.com text.txt

text.txt is also in the ezq directory.

Thanks for any suggestions.

use a configfile or -c commands

and no dosbox doesn't allow to paste stuff into it. You could try some sendkeys solution or so