DOSBox Games From a Thumbdrive?

[audiodane]

This is great. It solves the few but important problems that I could not easily solve with my own attempts. I am glad that DOSBox will soon support this new ability. I would still really like to build an old-style menu application (see attached), unless you are planning to do something of the sort already.

What do you think?
..dane

[Collector]

Of course that is an EXE with support files, not just a simple bat file. I don't believe that you can change colors from the command line in DOSBox the way you could in DOS or a console window.I wouldn't know how to do the drop shadow, either. It would probably take knowing some DOS graphics programming.

[audiodane]

agreed. there are tools though to do that very type of interface. I did some looking into it way back in the day, and even still have my old Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ installations that I can go back to. There would be a way to do it with ANSI graphics and scripting, but it would likely be more complicated than an executable. A simple good old fashioned dos executable would be I think a bit easier. If it's agreeable I'd like to work on it. But I most likely won't be able to start on it until June or July.

..dane

[Tawmis]

The drop shadow is all High ASCII. That's all they're doing.

I did it eons ago (mimicking Sierra's setup) for my own text adventure game...

[Collector]

But the menu needs to be a bat file.

[Qbix]

ansi can do what you want. It is quite a bit of work though. Maybe generate a language file for DOSBox and see how the startup message is drawn. you can use the same codes in a bat file.

[Collector]

Probably no non-DOS games.

[Collector]

ansi can do what you want. It is quite a bit of work though. Maybe generate a language file for DOSBox and see how the startup message is drawn. you can use the same codes in a bat file.

Thanks, I already knew how draw the box, but that gets me started on the colors.

[Qbix]

http://bluesock.org/~willg/dev/ansi.html
bold is a bit misleading. The colours can actually change a bit if you turn on the bold attribute. (brown -> yellow) (compare 33m with 33;1m)

Code: Select all

 <[attr;...;attrm   sets display attributes. attr values are:
                       0  normal     (white on black)
                       1  bold       (character colors are high-intensity)
                       4  underline  (IBM Monochrome monitor only)
                       5  blink      (foreground blinks)
                       7  reverse    (black on white)
                       8  no display (foreground = background)
                       30  BLACK foreground     40  BLACK background
                       31  RED foreground       41  RED background
                       32  GREEN foreground     42  GREEN background
                       33  YELLOW foreground    43  YELLOW background
                       34  BLUE foreground      44  BLUE background
                       35  MAGENTA foreground   45  MAGENTA background
                       36  CYAN foreground      46  CYAN background
                       37  WHITE foreground     47  WHITE background

so 31;45;1m would be pretty ugly (bright red letter on magenta background.)

[Collector]

Is there away to turn wrap off? I found [=7l to disable wrap, but it does not work in DOSBox. I don't know if this is a CMD vs DOS difference or not. It would be nice to be able to set the color to the edge of the screen somehow, since DOSBox does not have the color command.

[MusicallyInspired]

Haven't really followed this thread. I'm sorry, I'm just skimming and you may have delivered the answer already, but is there a reason why the menu needs to be BAT? What about doing a Windows menu with something like Quick Menu Builder? Used for CD autorun programs, but I imagine it can work as easily for thumb drives. I used Quick Menu Build to create autorun menus for my own custom Sierra CD/DVD collections. Each game entry could launch said game with DOSBox and a unique conf file for each game, similar to the shortcuts your installers already have. Of course, in this instance you'd need graphics and stuff ideally. My line of thinking was to have something similar to Vivendi's own Sierra collection game launchers.

[Collector]

The menu has to be dynamic in a way that will allow me to edit it via a script. The intent is to write a new set of installers specifically for thumb drives that could add the game to an existing thumb drive with games already installed by these installers. There is also generally a desire to be able to do it from within a DOSBox session. Portability is yet another. If the menu runs in DOSBox, the user can simply replace the DOSBox on the drive with proper port after it is installed on Windows. Since the paths in the conf are relative, they would only need to have the back slashes changed to forward. They may need to also change the output. pretty minor stuff. I wish I had someone to do some scripting for me so I could have versions of my installers for other platforms. Obviously Mac and Linux, but perhaps Android, too. iOS is problematic because of the idiotic decision to lock it down that would require jailbreaking it.

[Qbix]

I am not sure why you would want wrap. The colours don't reset if you move to the next line.
The command that turns off the wrap is indeed not supported as no ansi game has needed it so far.

[Collector]

I don't want wrap in this case. If you look at the capture you'll see that the teal does not go to the right edge of the screen, leaving a black edge. The changed back color does not show unless there is a character or at least a space. If I add one more space to the line it fills the teal to the edge, but drops to the next line, adding an empty line between. Perhaps I'll just forget about adding colors. Even if I have the script write the bat with no line breaks to get the color all the way to the right, the background color stops at the CHOICE command.

[audiodane]

MusicallyInspired-

A game-starter menu within a DOSBox instance means that it works just the same in DOSBox for windows as it would for DOSBox for mac or any other platform (jDosbox perhaps?), at least once those platform DOSBox's properly supported the reconfig option. It cleans things up quite nicely. I foresee my USB SierraStick(tm) ( ) having "runme" scripts for a windows and mac platform at the least, and I can just take it to anybody's computer regardless of OS, plug it in, and I'm off to playing.. That's *my* idea anyway. Play a while on a MAC, save it, move to a PC, and keep going.

Collector-

It's very interesting to use batch files to do the ansi drawing; I was assuming I'd use one of the old turbo pascal tools to do ansi menu development. And then I login and behold you're already doing screen captures of ansi menus. Blast you Collector, can no one best you!??!

Anyway, it might not LOOK as pretty, but you could always do a two pass system, since ansi codes support cursor placement. Paint the 'background' then go back and paint the menu atop the background. You could alternatively leave the outer edge of the whole screen black (line 0 & 24, column 0 & 79) which would still give you an aesthetic appearance but a simpler (line-wrap-less) design.

..dane