I very much doubt that you need a boot disk to play BAK in DOSBox. It was sometimes necessary to create a stripped down DOS boot disk the the good-ole-days, because the default DOS boot included unnecessary drivers and utilities that would take up precious memory. But with DOSBox that should not be necessary at all.

My advice is to ignore this step in the installation, and just carry on.

[Moved]

Thanks for responding to my post.
I would love to ignore this step and play the game , believe me, but the problem is I cant. I get the message about the boot disk in DosBox. I dont know how to proceed. If I can skip this, could you please tell me how?

Is the game installed at this point?

Game installs and runs perfectly in DOSBox 0.72 (CD-ROM version). MisterMetallic, which version of the game are you trying to install, and where did you get the game?

Yes the game is installed with the .exe file and all the rest.
The version I have is an original copy from 1993 or 94 when I first bought it.
Also, I have a downloaded version that I got after reading posts on another forum(the specific topic was talking about the download version, so I thought maybe my original disk might be problematic with DosBox). The dosbox version I have is 0.72.

If the game is installed, what is the problem? Start DOSBox, mount your drives, start the game, be happy.

I can mount the C drive and the 'games' folder. When I type in 'Krondor' next to the prompt, I get this message:

You have 341,680 bytes free
You do not have enough memory to run Betrayal At Krondor
Try using the make boot disk option from INSTALL.

Now the problem is when I try and re-install and make the disk, it tells me I dont have enough memory. The message here is as follows:

This game requires 1482k of extended memory and your machine does not have enough.

Im sorry but I dont know what extended memory is?

Post the contents of your dosbox.conf

To put it simply, the earliest IBM-compatible PCs (think 1980s) had an address limit of 1MB. When the '286 processor came around, the newly available addresses beyond the previous 1MB limit were termed "extended memory" by the all-wise makers of MS-DOS. Their use is not as straightforward under MS-DOS as the use of lower addresses, since MS-DOS was created for the old PCs with the limit in place. Therefore many games have separate requirements for "conventional" (low address) and "extended" (high address beyond 1MB) memory.

Make sure your dosbox.conf file has "xms=true" in the [dos] section, and memsize=16 in the [dosbox] section. However by default this is both the case, so if you haven't edited dosbox.conf and changed it then you should be all set on that level.

Try typing "mem" in dosbox at the moment when you'd normally type "krondor" . It will show you how much memory of each kind you have. (don't confuse "extended" with "expanded" memory which is still another kind.)

Is this the CD or floppy version?

Collector- It is the original cd version, and I also have a downloaded version.

XMS=true and memsize=16 are both in the appropriate sections in the file.
Thank you all for your help, I appreciate it, but are you sure its ok to post the contents of the config file here, its rather long.

When I type 'mem' in DOS these are the results:
64kb free conventional memory
63 kb free upper memory in 1 blocks (largest UMB 63kb)
15280 kb free extended memory
15280 kb free expanded memory

634kb free conventional memory I assume

Okay I got the freeware file bak2.zip
unzipped it .
unzipped krondorz.exe
ran install.exe in dosbox
selected option 3 (save settings)
ran krondor.exe in dosbox
game loads (takes a while though)

IT WORKS!!

perhaps the problem was I never ran install from dosbox before....thats the only thing I did differently.
Thank you all VERY much, you've restored my faith in humanity. I owe you guys big.

Two minor questions before I'm off to play:
1- is there any way to maximize the screen?
2- My mouse pointer seems to get lost and disappear in the game screen. anyone know why or how to get it back without pressing Ctrl/Alt/Delete?

1 yes
2. ctrl-f10

Ok thanks a lot man, Im really psyched about this, its been years.Its late now so I'll play it tomorrow
Could you tell me how to maximize the screen before I go? Thanks

alt-enter

Damn the people who write README's must be sooooooo useless