Trying out DOSbox

I'm primarily a console gamer, but Psycho Pinball was one of a handful of PC games from my early childhood that I really, truly loved. I was also quite fond of Pong Kombat and Sango Fighter, but that's another post. Maybe.

So I got the CD for about $10 shipped on eBay, and then I found I needed DOSbox. Installing it was a bit tricky, so I'm going to list links and document exactly what I did so I can do it again on other computers later:

DOSBox manual
Installation and game start examples
Another installation tutorial with ISO examples
Settings tweaks


During the game installation, for sound, I did SoundBlaster 16 and then auto-select.


For tweaks (getting the proper aspect ratio on my 1080p display):

[sdl]
fullscreen=true
fulldouble=false
fullresolution=desktop
windowresolution=1280x960
output=ddraw
[render]
aspect=true

That output=ddraw part was a doozy; I couldn't figure out why the game would briefly lose sync after starting.

Since I'm not fond of using the CD to start the game (the DVD drive takes up both of my USB 2.0 ports), I'm going to try loading the game as an ISO... which means doing everything from scratch again...

---

EDIT: So this is exactly what I did. I wanted all my ISOs in C:\DOSBox so I manually created the directory in Windows. But of course DOSBox and/or the game will make their own directories during installation, and I didn't want any redundancies.


Installation: Starting DOSBox:

mount c "c:\dosbox"
c:
imgmount d "psycho.iso" -t iso
d:
install


Installation screen:

CD ROM drive letter: D
PSYCHO Directory: C


Now on my actual computer, the directories are nice and neat:

C:\DOSBox\PSYCHO

(PSYCHO was created by the installation; DOSBox would've created a DOSBox folder, but since I chose C as the PSYCHO directory, there was no need.)


Starting the game in DOSBox (put this under [autoexec] in DOSBox 0.74 Options.bat):
mount c "c:\dosbox"
c:
imgmount d "psycho.iso" -t iso
cd psycho
psycho