Did you edit drive.cd?

Yep, done that and I still get the error message.

Just to make sure, the game *does* work if you play it the normal way? (With a mounted CD and such?).
CD.ID is in the right folder too, right?
Perhaps the game expects to find..say c:\dark\ instead of c:\ the way you installed it...
Fun fact: if you edit drive.cd incorrectly, the game asks you where the CD-ROM...diskette is located 😜

I'm having this problem too with the Steam version of Dark Forces. Well, the Steam version works perfectly fine, but when I try to run it with my local version of Dosbox instead of theirs, I'm stuck with the no-cd error.

I have been able to pinpoint the problem to my version of dosbox: I have installed 0.74, while Steam provides 0.73. After having installed 0.73 myself, I was able to succesfully run DARK.EXE. I juggled a bit with the various dosbox.conf files but it didn't change anything.

All this using Windows 7. I also tried Ubuntu 12.04 with 0.74, where I initially encountered the problem. (I tried bypassing it by duplicating steam/dark and mounting one as a cd-rom but the game then complained about missing HelNum.fnt, a file nowhere to be found. But it's probably because the Steam version doesn't have any of the CD files.)

So there seem to be a regression between 0.73 and 0.74 regarding this game. I haven't tried the nightlies.

There's no regression, only a misconfiguration on your part, most likely a wrong mount.
How do I know? Below is a screenshot I just took with official, stable, DosBox 0.74 using Steam Dark Forces.
Steam Dark Forces needs the game folder itself to be mounted as C.

Works fine in DOSBOX SVN with a image of the original CD. (Didn't test 0.74 although I'm sure I did test it years ago).

Yet another reason why thee services should provide original media.

Despite me agreeing that they should provide original media, the game works just fine, this is a user error.

bloodbat wrote:

Steam Dark Forces needs the game folder itself to be mounted as C.

That's the thing. I tried again today and now everything works. I have no idea what I botched though, I thought I was quite thorough. Oh well.

the game folder doesn't need to be root, as long as CD.ID itself is at the root.