DOSBoxRunSetup for SCI Companion

[MusicallyInspired]

Good question! Seems OS related.

[gumby]

Collector - are there switches for a silent install?  I'm looking to install this from the command line.

[Collector]

I am not sure what you are trying to do. It is designed to be invoked by the run button from within the editor. On first run it does require some user input for DOSBox location, etc. From then on, it should simply run from the run button. An NSIS installer can be run silently, but it has to be compiled to do so. If you are looking for a solution for distribution of your game, a different tool would have to be designed.

[gumby]

I meant an unattended installation of your DosBoxRunSetup application, no GUI interaction.  In my current development, I'll create a new game (via script) multiple times at a sitting; I was simply trying to eliminate a manual step.

[Collector]

There has to be some interaction. Without it, it would not be able find DOSBox. About the only thing that ends up in the registry from DOSBox is from the MRU cache or other things from usage (searches, opened in other programs, etc.) Even the official DOSBox installer does not track anything in the Registry. Without interaction the only way to automatically get the location of the user's DOSBox would be to do a file search on the whole system. Besides the time that that would take, if the user had more than one build of DOSBox on their system, the run utility would not know which one to use. A straight forward search would probably just take the first one it found and then quit.

That said, I suppose that it would be possible to do a new version that could refer to an ini or XML file or a registry entry to use some predetermined DOSBox. It could even include DOSBox in the same folder, but that would mean a separate DOSBox for each game. Perhaps just a separate script to be used in batch processing?

I wish my C++ skills were something more than nonexistant. I would love to take on Companion and/or Studio to update/modernize the interface. I would add some of the various tools and utilities, including seamlessly integrate the run utility and my other project.

[gumby]

But when I install it, I don't think I've ever have to specify the DosBox location (and certainly not recently).  I just click through the 'Next' dialogs and I'm all set - that's why I was thinking that a 'silent install' would be practical.

EDIT:  Yeah, you've supplied a default path to DosBox, which I adopted.  I never have to use the 'override' checkbox to specify the location.  Even if it needed to, I would think that the path could be a command-line option.

[Collector]

There is the mounting that has to added, too. Are you adding a GAME.INI for each game? If so the one line in it needs to be set to Executable=run.exe. The other thing would be to set the "mount c" of each dosbox.conf to the game's folder. If you can't figure out how to do this from your script, let me know and I'll see what I can come up with. I would need a little information on how you are scripting this. Are you using a Pearl Script? What all do you have the script doing? Besides the game scripts, what files does your script add to each game? Any other relevant information that I should to know to customize this for your script?

[gumby]

You are right, I can script this task out myself - I didn't mean for you to put so much more effort into this, I was just hoping that there was a really trivial way to do it with your installer.

I'll just modify the dosbox.conf, dosbox.ini, game.ini, game.bat appropriately.  Shouldn't be a problem.

[Cloudee1]

Hey Collector, why is it that when I open a game straight in dosbox vs using the dosboxrunsetup batch file, the screen resolution is different. The batch file seems to stretch the screen a little long. Any idea on a correct ratio to set in the .conf file. I've played around with it a bit, but can't seem to get it right.

[Collector]

Aspect ratio is enabled by default. This gives it the proper perspective. Remember that the shape of pixels has changed since the SCI0 days. The SCI engine stretches 400 pixels into the same aspect ratio (4:3) as later (S)VGA's 480 pixels. Aspect ratio will give you the perspective that the Sierra artists intended and should make full screen and windowed consistent. However, if you draw your VIEWs and PICs on modern hardware without taking this into account, your images will be taller than what Sierra would have drawn. If you want to squish the screen, set aspect= to false.