I suspect this is a problem with your launcher and not with DOSBox. Some launchers require you to specify directives (or arguments) in a separate box from the program name.

Are you able to run other programs with arguments, like firefox -p ?

Thanks, Jorpho, for your response. I googled to be sure I was setting up the launcher correctly, and I think I was. I looked at a couple of other launchers and they were able to pass arguments to their target programs OK. So I guess there is something specific between the Nemo launcher and DOSBox that is causing my problem.

I have created a quick and easy work-around: I made a one line script to invoke DOSBox with the required arguments, then invoked the script from the launcher. Works fine, problem solved.

Your resopnse put me on the track toward this solution and I thank you for it. 😀

I think the problem is ~.
~ is expanded into your home directory by the shell. The launcher doesn't expand ~, so dosbox can't find the conf file.
Try putting the full path of the conf file in the launcher - /home/.../.dosbox/specificconffile.conf .

Hello M-HT

You nailed it. 😀

Now I can make other launchers without fooling around with unnecessary scripts.
Thank you.

That is a solution well worth to keep in mind. There will always be that one program that doesn't know what to do with ~/...
So I try to test it always whether to use the full path or the short version...