Dosbox Pnd File Ideas


Grench

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I have some ideas for a DOSBox PND set up, but I'm not an expert on DOSBox and although I've read up enough to know how the PND system presents itself, I have no idea of how to set one up.

I do have a few ideas of how -I- would want it to behave with DOSBox. I'm sure opinions on this may vary. So, I thought it would be entertaining and potentially useful to discuss it. Maybe whomever can set this up will find some of the suggestions helpful. If they do not, I still don't think the effort is a waste.

My thoughts:
Have a PND set up on the SDHC card that automatically does the following:

Sound & Video Ideas:
Configures the screen as 640x480 VGA - native resolution for many of the old old games and apps that have a hope of working.
Sets up the sound as SB-16 compatible.

Drive Mapping Ideas:
Set up three directories on the SDHC card (if they don't already exist). DOSBoxC, DOSBoxY, DOSBoxISO
DOSBoxC -set up a drive mount to this as C: in DOSBox. This is where applications get installed.
DOSBoxY -set up a drive mount to this as Y: in DOSBox. This is where the user can save data files to be easily backed up.
DOSBoxISO - set up mounts to drive letters E: through W: to the first 19 CD ISO images found in this directory (can this be done?)
Set up auto-recognition of standard USB drive devices.
Automount USB Floppy (if ONE exists) as A:/B:
Automount USB Floppies (if TWO exist) as A: and B: in the order they appear to the host OS
Automount USB CD/DVD ROM (if exists) as D:
Reserve X: as a user mountable resource - in case they want to manually mount something else.

Controller Mapping Ideas:
Map the right nub as mouse
Map the left shoulder button as mouse left click
Map the right shoulder button as mouse right click
Map the left nub as joystick
Map the left game pad as an 8 way to relate to Home, up arrow, pg up, right arrow, pg dn, down arrow, End, left arrow
Map the right game pad as a joystick 4 position hat

Just ideas - I don't have a dev board or a Pandora, so I haven't had a chance to see what Pickle's DOSBox front end looks like. It may very well already address a lot of the above.
http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/52296-dboxfe-qt-help/

Again, these are just ideas. Hopefully at least some of it is novel enough to spur development ideas.

Thank you.
 
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I think the current pnd file just assumes a drive C as "games" dir in the pnd, which means /pandora/appdata/dosboxwhatever/games woudl be your C: for DOSbox, and just drop stuff in there. (You could alter dosbox.conf to point to any dir of course.)

It defaults to fullscreen pandora, with VGA and SVGA support (VGA being faster.)

IT woudl be easy to make multiple conf files (drop them in the appdata folder) and have the PXML.xml have multiple applications (where each is just dosbox -conf somethign.conf). Or perhaps have a single executable which is a sh-script which fires up a zenity GUI to list availabel conf files from appdata and run dosbox with the selectred one.

A litt'e involved' (someone shoudl set this up and then distribute the pnd so average joe doesn't have to), but a lot of cool options :)

jeff
 
Well I'm not sheer how the pnd will use the configure files.

Most of what you are looking for can be dun in the dos dox config and the autoexec.bat
depending on your dos experience you should be able to make the autoexec.bat do any of the configuration you can do manually from inside dos box.
Personally I work in autoexec.bat for most of my dos box stuff, but I'm old school dos when every thing was in autoexec.bat or config.sys
 
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