SWITCHING FOLDERS IN DOSBOX
 

I have unearthed my old PC Bard's Tale 1 5.25 floppies and have pulled the contents into a modern PC. I did so to use my highly leveled up characters I made in the late 80's. Bard's Tale comes with 3 disks (PROGRAM disk, PICTURE disk, and CHARACTER disk). I now have these in 3 respective folders on my C drive (c:\bard1_program, c:\bard1_picture, c:\bard1_character).

I can launch Bard's Tale 1 in Dosbox just fine. However it's one of those games that requires you to constantly switch between the three disks while the game is running.

I see tutorials that allow you to mount several disk images in Dosbox and switch between them with the CMD-F4 key. But I don't have disk images of the original disks. Just their contents placed in the three folders listed above.

Is there any way to mount all 3 FOLDERS in Dosbox and switch between them as needed (much like the disk images)?

If this is possible, can someone give me a step by step tutorial on how to successfully mount them?

Thank you

EDIT: It should also be noted that all three folders have files with the exact same names, so I can't dump all of the contents into one folder.

There are a few ways I can think of how to do what you want.

Option 1: Mount one of the directories in DOSBox. When you need to switch to another folder, rename the original folder to something else and rename the folder you want to switch to as the original folder. Press Ctrl+F4 in DOSBox to reset diskcaching.

Option 2: Make floppy disk images of the original floppies and mount them in DOSBox. DOSBox doesn't support mounting multiple floppy images so you'd have to use another program like Virtual Floppy Drive to mount/switch the images.

Option 3: Make iso images of the folders. For example, Folder2Iso can do that on Windows. Then mount the images in DOSBox with imgmount and press Ctrl+F4 to switch between images. You can't save any changes to the images in DOSBox.

Option 4: Put all files in one dir. ;)

:mhh:

*shrugs* Well, don't you think that it could be the same files? :)

But, oh, well, I'll research the issue further.

...Hmm, I wasn't able to found 3-disks version. There are only 3.5'' (one disk) and 5.25" (2 disks) around. And even 2-disks haven't double files.

Also, both versions can be installed on HDD with "install.bat"

Is your version different, anubis266?

I can guess that "Characters" is this third disk maybe, with saved games/characters? What are exact name of this double files? Are this, by chance, have *.TPW extension? In this case all of them are saved characters. :)

Do you need to absolutely have the same drive? If you have any kind of option to switch drive when the game prompt you for a disk then you could use A:, B: and whatever letter which isn't C: and D: for the third one.

Thanks for all the advice. The duplicate files were indeed the characters. I had tried dumping them all into one folder to start, but there were two corrupted characters (out of like 70), and just having them in my folder would not allow me to see any of my other characters. I deleted them and was able to access all the characters and the entire game from one folder.

It's good to know the folder renaming trick though. I might have to incorporate it for Pool of Radiance, because I can't get that disk switching problem to work now.

Anyhow, that's a problem for a different day.

Thanks!