Hi all,

I've been thinking of ways to package up DOS games for easy archiving, distribution and access and I'm wondering whether anyone has already come up with a "DOSBox distribution format" that could be used for this?

I'm thinking of something along the lines of a single file that contains all the game files and a DOSBox configuration file, so you could download one of these files, double-click on it and start playing.

You'd obviously need certain system-wide settings set already that are specific to your PC (screen size, render method, sample rates, etc.) but the distribution format should take care of everything specific to the game environment (sound card IRQs, what drive letter the game files appear on, etc.)

I think being able to package everything up into a single file would make it much easier to organise collections of games and keep them ready to run on any DOSBox installation.

The only unanswered questions I have about making this work are:

• You would need some place to store savegames if the distribution files are readonly (or a 'copy on write' layer to handle games that write high scores directly into the .exe for example)
• Each PC has a different optimal "cycles" value, so ideally an additional option would have to be introduced to best match DOSBox's speed to an 8086, 80286, etc. or "max" if the game doesn't need to be artificially slowed down.

If nothing has been done like this already, is it something that other people would consider useful?