I know it's frustrating when you need to figure out DOSBox parameters in order to run the game, sometimes for people who are not familiar with old hardware get easily stuck with configuration. A friend of mine who doesn't know a bit about all that vintage stuff has asked me to make him a game to run at system without all that hassle with DOSBox configuration and so on. So I've put everything together, configured, tested and finally compiled into nice-looking installer based on small-yet-powerful NSIS (see the screenshots below). Then I realized that perhaps this is what people really want, easy pre-configured build without all those troubles and frustration when it comes to running old games on modern system. Given that there's a discussion about Abandonia & BitTorrent I thought it would be cool make some sort of user-friendly releases that way and then use BitTorrent to download those. I'm sure DOSBox experts and those with patience (like me) will eventually make almost any game run smooth but what about the rest? I'm sure they would find something like this very nice and friendly:
In the end he just had to click "next", "next", "next" and then simply run shortcut in program files and that's it. Everything else was pre-configured.
Perhaps all this isn't worth it, perhaps it's quite complicated given that the person who have to make those must know NSIS script and so on. But perhaps there is a chance making games like that, something I believe Abandonia could use later...
CD images can be stored inside the installer (which can be un7zipped manually, useful for linux folks) so the purists can get original CD image for their collection. There are many other possibilities and so on... but before going anywhere further... Comments, thoughts, ideas?