About the "... not suitable ..." error: make sure the games are in a short directoy (i.e. "C:\GAMES\BLA" instead of "C:\My games\my stuff\my copy of bla"). This is only an issue with old versions of Launchpad (older than 1.0.0.7) or with NTFS systems on which support for old 8.3 (short) filenames was disabled.

About MIDI: VDMSound's "MIDI" *does* go through your soundcard (and if you have more than one MIDI device you can even tell VDMSound which one to use). AdLib is not MIDI, though, and I have a feeling that AdLib is what you're referring to. AdLib is fundamentally different from MIDI and can't be properly mapped to MIDI (there is absolutely no point IMHO). If the game does support MIDI then tell it to use MIDI instead of FM/AdLib and you decide which one you like best.

Unfortunately that didn't help... The message persists. Obviously, the issue is this .nt file that is created by the program that has some invalid parameters for Windows XP, thus it can't be combined appropriately with the files...
If you know how I can change thee files, it could help.
Thanks

So what is, in your LaunchPad shortcut, the full path of the game and the directory in which it supposedly runs (go to "Properties" of the LaunchPad VDMSound shortcut you made for the game, go to "Advanced", and copy-paste the contents of the "Program" and "Run in" boxes).

LaunchPad appears to work fine on WinXP so I don't think it's any parameters, although your theory remains a possibility.

V.

Problem Solved! You were right about the long command line although the issue were not the games directory but the directory where VDMS was installed instead! I mean that the C:\Program Files\VDMSound\... was too long for the Windows to understand it, so when I moved it to a root directory like C:\VDMSound, the problem was solved! Thank you for your help and keep playing DOS games!:)
Panos

Wow. That's weird. I'm glad I changed my program files directory to C:\SBIN. 😜 (I'm such a luser.)

Good to hear it's working now. Vlad, you should find out why this is happening.

I'm leaving this thread open for further dialogue about the filepath of VDMSound.

Hmmm, that's really weird because @ work VDMSound and LaucnhPad work 100% fine off C:\Program Files\VDMSound. I am afraid that your NTFS FS was told not to support short file names, so Windows can't convert "C:\Program Files" to "C:\Progra~1" or something and screws up.

Open a command prompt and type:

dir C:\Progra~1

...what happens?

V.

Well, you are right, I was a bit in haste to get happy, because the problem persists in most cases. I mean that, while I can make myself a shortcut and use the autoexec.vdms and config.vdms customed files the way I can while before I couldn't do it (because the path c:\program files\vdmsound was not revognized), I still cannot create a shortcut using the Launchpad, and configure the advanced settings. The same error appears again. Moreover when I try to find the .nt file sited in the temp folder, it cannot be found (hidden files revealed of course)! That means that it is most possible that the temporary .nt file cannot be found by the system. Is there any way this configuration file be created in another directory or that I can change it whenever I want? I have noted that in my C:\Documents and Settings\ directory where the user data is stored, there has been created a new folder named with the corrupted name _ë=__. MAybe this is the reason it can't be read correctly by Windows... I also use FAT32 system and not NTFS...

Thanks and sorry for the misinformation!

Ouch! Check your FAT ASAP and switch to NTFS unless you want to access it from a dual-boot. The temp files are created in C:\Document...\<userid>\Local... and they last for 30 seconds or so from the moment when you launch the game with VDMSound, during which interval you can make copies for analysis.

V.