Reply 100 of 104, by Wengier
Avenger wrote on 2021-04-27, 02:58:So I gave this a go. I definitely like the expanded UX options such as removing UI elements, BIOS splash screen, desktop positio […]
Wengier wrote on 2021-04-25, 21:43:Avenger wrote on 2021-04-25, 21:08:Well, the standard DOSBox SVN LFN release from a few years back wouldn't do it so that's why I ask. I was able to run EXE files with more than the standard 8.3 characters but spaces still caused problems.
I'm hoping that this X version has changed that.
The LFN patch for SVN had not been updated for some time, so it is a much older version compared with the DOSBox-X version. The LFN patch for SVN supports spaces in file reading/writing etc (e.g. type "a b.txt" will work), but not in file execution (which is why running the EXE file "hard game.exe" did not work). On the other hand, the LFN support in DOSBox-X is a much newer version and resolves all such issues. Hope this helps.
So I gave this a go. I definitely like the expanded UX options such as removing UI elements, BIOS splash screen, desktop position, etc. A lot of the additional features are certainly suited for applications though (and there's a TON of them) which in my circumstance aren't needed so I had to strip down all the .conf files I created considerably to make them traversable as opposed to a massive wall of text settings.
A couple of other things:
-Long file name support does work for EXE's with spaces in the name but does not for WAD files. Even with quotes or wild cards.
-Quake game music sounds a little odd. Almost as if it's being slightly drawn out. It's hard to explain. I compared using the exact same settings on the same machine between the regular 0.74 version of DOSBox and then spent an hour messing with the audio settings with no luck. I'm personally running the game through QDOS as the machine I used doesn't have an optical drive for my disc and this allows music playback via OGG files. Don't know if that has anything to do with it but I would assume there shouldn't be any difference in behavior from the base version.I'll continue to use it with the hope of these being fixed in the future.
Cheers.
This thread is about LFN support, so I will primarily talk about the LFN feature here. I am not quite sure what you meant by “does not for WAD files”. In DOS (or DOSBox/DOSBox-X indeed) only EXE, COM, and BAT are executable files. Files with other extensions can be viewed, read, or write, but not executable. Can you please give a concrete example to show exactly what you meant above? If it is indeed an issue I will certainly try to fix. Please also note that if you are running a DOS program or game, the LFN feature is only available if the program or game itself supports it, or it won’t work, which is not an issue of any particular LFN patch, but how the LFN feature works in general, including real DOS environments with LFN support. There are indeed many newer DOS programs (and some games) support LFNs, but not older ones.
As for game music, it is not about LFN support, but I want to mention that DOSBox-X natively supports FluidSynth and MT-32 which are not supported by vanilla DOSBox, and you probably want to give them a try, and they may sound much better than the default MIDI handler. DOSBox-X also supports cue sheets with MP3/OGG/Opus/FLAC audio tracks which are not supported by vanilla DOSBox.
Additionally, there are two reference config files in DOSBox-X, the “common” one and a full one, namely dosbox-x.reference.conf and dosbox-x.reference.full.conf respectively. If you do not need the full config options, you can just use the “common” config file as your config reference. You can further reduce the config file size by using a command like “config -mod -wcp config.conf” which will write modified config options only, perhaps also a -norem option to remove all comments so that the config file will be even smaller. Hope this helps.