You will be prompted for a list of machines to use when syncing the folder, as shown here: In the status screen that follows, select “sync a folder” and choose your DOS folder.
Then, from the machine that has your DOS folder, right-click on the Mesh icon in the system tray and select “Open Windows Live Mesh”. Set each machine to log into Windows Live automatically using the same username and password.
To get started, download and install Windows Live Mesh on every computer where you want to run DOSBox. Mesh gives you up to 5GB of online space that can be used as a sync point for these folders. It has several features, including the ability to remotely access any of your machines running the Mesh software, but the feature that we’re interested in for this post is one that allows you to automatically and transparently synchronize an entire folder tree between multiple machines. Mesh is a fantastic product that more people should know about. Next, you’ll need to set up Windows Live Mesh.
As long as the DOSBox, CBoxRun, and programs folders are all in the same top-level folder along with nf, CBoxRun will be able to find everything that it needs.
With this setup, it doesn’t matter where the DOS directory is actually located. (It’s stored in your local user AppPath by default.)įor example, my CBoxRun setup looks like this: Next, you will need to configure CBoxRun to use relative paths for the DOSBox and programs directories, and most importantly, you will need to move your nf file into a folder under your DOS folder. In my setup, each DOS game lives in a separate folder under the games directory. For example, I have a directory called DOS which contains CBoxRun, DOSBox, and Games folders, as shown here: The first step in doing this is to install all of your DOSBox related items in a single folder path. Step One – Set up your DOSBox environment to support relative paths In this post, I’ll show how you can use CBoxRun’s relative path support, along with Windows Live Mesh, to synchronize your DOSBox game environment across multiple computers. If you’re like me (and I hope for your sake that you’re not, but that’s another topic entirely), you probably have several computers and would like to share your awesome DOSBox setup on each of them with a minimum of fuss. Your comments are always welcome, so please let me know if you have any ideas for the next version. Any thoughts or suggestions about this would be appreciated.Īgain, thanks for your patience and support! There’s not much new to show right now – most of the changes so far are under the covers, such as migrating the XML data to SQL – but as I make changes to the UI I’ll post screenshots to show the progress. Then the normal “add a game” steps would be taken, or some subset of them anyway, for each game. The idea would be that CBoxRun would walk a directory tree and import games found in any subdirectory of that tree, probably by showing a list of executable files in a particular subdirectory tree and asking the user to pick the “real” program executable. This would be useful for people who already have large numbers of DOS games on their machines.
If possible, I’d also like to add some sort of bulk game import feature.
An offline mode for users who run DOSBox on a computer without an always-on network connection.A conversion utility will be included so that your old lists can be imported. Migration of the program list and most other XML lists to a SQL Server Compact database to improve performance and reliability, especially for those of you with hundreds of games.The next version should include a good number of the items on the to-do list, and I’m also planning several other large changes: Opportunities to work on the program have been few and far between for the past year, but I’m pleased to report that work has resumed and is going well.
First, let me apologize for the slow pace of work on CBoxRun in 2011.