Suggestion for DosBox Pure, for easy launch/close of Windows 9X games

Libretro Cores
#21

hi, I think I am facing the same issue. I have read some post and understand dosbox-pure use a .sav file system to record the change and save it in Retroarch/saves folder while we are playing a windows game. However, i wonder is there a way to transfer the real in-game save files out of the emulated Windows 98 environment?

For example, I played a game via DosBox Pure emulated Windows 98 and saved my progress. I can see the new save file inside the game folder, in emulated win98 D drive. Is there a way to export these save files and copy them to another Windows system?

(Sorry that English is not my first language and I hope my words are appropriate.)

#22

Hey there,

If you copy your file on the emulated C: drive, it will be written inside the .img file in your /Retroarch/System folder, with the same name of the ā€œrun with installed OSā€ you use.

Then you can open this .img image file by mounting it, on Windows and Linux systems itā€™s usually done by right clicking and selecting the mount option. The image is read only, not modify.

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#23

Whenever i do this it says the file is corrupted.

#24

.img is an open source format. If you canā€™t mount it, you can open it with WinRAR or 7z, I guess.

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#25

Yes, i also got this corrupted information, may be the .img format is too old for win11? But I found a solution, just simply use 7-zip to open and extract it!

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#26

Thank you very much ! It works!

and I also found that UltraISO can directly import files into this .img . This can help bring files into the emulated win98 from ā€˜outsideā€™ . Finally i can transfer file in and out without affecting the .sav file from dosbox-pure. Really thx a lot!!

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#27

Thatā€™s good news,

Iā€™m on linux here and it seems fuseiso is mounting the image in read-only by default, but I didnā€™t dig for more as I thought importing files by opening a zip in the core was manageable.

Other than that Iā€™ve used qemu-img to shrink img files here, as explained earlier in the thread. So far no issues but I made a backup before tweaking. AFAIK the image is for old FAT32, no support for files >4GB, long file names, some special caracters in names might break stuff in Win98. Breaking Win98 is half the fun anyway.

If you guys got a similar system to open the incremental .sav files please let me know. Iā€™ve searched a bit but didnā€™t find any.

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#28

Thereā€™s another way to bring files in the system, easily. Just zip all the files you want to bring and name the archive something random, say, ā€œ111111.zipā€. Then open this zip file as content with DosBox Pure and it will mount it normally, like any game, with itā€™s own D drive and .Sav file. Copy the files you want to the C drive and once finished, you can just delete the 11111.sav file that was created.

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#29

Yes, you can open it with 7z and extract files from it, but you canā€™t add files in it. When i try this i get a ā€œnot implementedā€ error.

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