TrashPanda wrote on 2022-02-13, 01:49:Anything else and you are better off with dosbox X which is a full pc emulator.
The difference between how regular DOSBox and DOSBox-X emulate hardware is extremely minimal. Claiming one is a full PC emulator while saying the other isn't is ignorant.
jmarsh wrote on 2022-02-13, 02:38:You may as well just copy the contents of the CD to a subdirectory.
Except that in some OS's they EXPECT real CD access. Like they try to read from the CD with CD access commands (or even if they don't do that, they are hardcoded to either read from drive D, or they are hardcoded to look in the Windows Registry to find the drive letter for the CD drive and then use that). So just copying the files to drive C, would mean that the OS would NEVER FIND the files it's looking for. Only allowing continued emulation of a CD drive when booting from a HDD image (instead of discarding the emulated MSCDEX driver as soon as a HDD image is booted from), would solve this problem.
...which isn't going to work anyway if you force windows to use MSCDEX - most of the CD-specific ioctls provided by windows will fail. Hence my point.
jmarsh wrote on 2022-02-13, 02:40:TrashPanda wrote on 2022-02-13, 01:49:Anything else and you are better off with dosbox X which is a full pc emulator.
The difference between how regular DOSBox and DOSBox-X emulate hardware is extremely minimal. Claiming one is a full PC emulator while saying the other isn't is ignorant.
Fine neither are, they are both limited in what they emulate to the point you are better off with the real thing.
It’s not the how that matters, it’s the what that’s important for the distinction.
Anyway I’m done with this dos box talk, more important things to talk about.
the solution is qemu or virtualbox. dosbox is not what you want for win95.
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videogamer555 wrote on 2022-02-13, 02:53:Except that in some OS's they EXPECT real CD access. Like they try to read from the CD with CD access commands (or even if they don't do that, they are hardcoded to either read from drive D, or they are hardcoded to look in the Windows Registry to find the drive letter for the CD drive and then use that). So just copying the files to drive C, would mean that the OS would NEVER FIND the files it's looking for. Only allowing continued emulation of a CD drive when booting from a HDD image (instead of discarding the emulated MSCDEX driver as soon as a HDD image is booted from), would solve this problem.
Note that most Win9x installs (e.g. by OEMs) are done from a directory in the hard drive as suggested, and Win9x has absolutely no problems with this. In fact, it is sometimes used to workaround issues found during 1st boot (where it starts asking for the CD before the CD driver can be loaded), and it is more convenient overall (if you have the extra 50M-ish disk space).
