As the name suggests, LeMenu is a menu making package that includes a directory manager. Menus and sub-menus can be created, you can run Batch-files from the menu directly as if these were normal programs and even a basic activity log is kept. The menu itself supports up to 4 different levels and can hold 26 items each, an item for each letter of the alphabet, which gives the possibility of setting up more menu items than the largest collection of software running within Dosbox that I’ve ever seen.
If you search the web you’ll find a lot statements that the installation of Windows Millennium or Windows ME on Dosbox is just not possible, that it will not work, that it will not even complete setup, no matter what. I wouldn’t be writing this if I hadn’t found differently. Nowadays it is indeed possible to run Windows ME on Dosbox and, even though it’s not supported, it is fairly stable. At least more stable than I expected and a lot more stable than Windows 98SE on the same environment.
When Command & Conquer was released in 1995 and its companion with a different tone Command & Conquer: Red Alert in 1996, it was something of a revolution in the RTS game play. Of course Dune II had been released a few years before, also developed by Westwood studios, setting the tone for many RTS games that followed in the years to come. (This includes Warcraft, which eventually let to World of Warcraft, DOTA and many others that a lot of people still play daily nowadays)
Now that the remastered edition is announced for 2020, the 25th anniversary of the game, I got interested again in the original Dos game. Since the original is 2CD’s (GDI and NOD) and later an expansion was added named: Command & Conquer: The Covert Operations, I thought it was time to create a quick batch file to load which ever disk instead of having to type the commands in Dosbox every single time. Batch files are the reason that I’m using non-standard commands and add-ons to Dosbox, so here the bat-file that I’ve written for C&C:
I’ve been a big fan of Dosbox ever since I found out about it in 2004. Dosbox has been around since 2002, I just didn’t find out about it until later. At the time virtualisation was still in its infancy and virtualising MS-Dos to play old games on was not that easy and fairly memory intensive. Also Windows XP did not run most of the MS-Dos games I wanted to play. For a few years now I’m mainly using Dosbox-X or Dosbox-ECE as these bring more features than the standard Dosbox. My base configuration has not changed significantly over the last 10 years.
For my normal utilities I’ve added a line to the dosbox.conf which mounts a normal folder located on my physical machine. The path I use is normally c:\temp\dosbox\e and I’m mounting this with:
@mount e "C:\Temp\Dosbox\E"
The reason I’m mounting a folder instead of an image is that this way I can very easily add and remove software and have this available with just a quick reboot (CTRL-ALT-Home) of Dosbox. The standard folder structure within the mounted e-drive is:
The directories cd, floppy and hdd keep .img files for the respective formats. The dos directory keeps a full copy of MS-Dos 5.0 with various additional little utilities added from FreeDos. The reason it’s MS-Dos 5.0 is that Dosbox reports its version as being 5.0. One of the extra little utilities that is not included in Dos version 5.0 is “choice.com”. This handy little utility wasn’t included until Dos version 6 and is still available in Windows 95/98. Choice.com is basically indispensable for creating interactive batch files. I’m using the FreeDos version which is called “choice.exe”.
The full autoexec part of the dosbox.conf is:
[autoexec] @echo off @mount e “C:\temp\Dosbox\E” @e: @path=z:\;e:\;e:\dos;e:\cd;e:\floppy;e:\hdd;
The reason I’m putting all these folders in the path is that I keep my batch-files with the images.
