What would be cool to see is someone making a linux build that uses dosbox as the skin and play games off the bat.

man I might have something going on here ;)

Is there a way to get D-Fend Reloaded to recognize .GOG games without much hassle?

I think you just drag the folder or show the path where its located?

Thank you everyone for you answers! I decided to tag DukeNukemForever's answer as the best as they were the first one to address both frontends I mentioned (and we know that rep doesn't really matter that much at this point anyway).

I probably won't use Launchbox as I'd like something a bit more like D-Fend, only with Dosbox games as it feels that way better.

Because for some reason I thought Logitech was your video graphics card, haha! And now it clicked, I even have a USB Logitech mouse I use when I need it. :D Makes sense. It's strange though that you can't pair it with the game's exe that's launched from the frontend though.

Not sure if anyone else addressed this (didn't see any mention of it past your opening post, though I admit I only skimmed the thread), but the command to capture/"uncapture" the mouse cursor in DOSBox is CTRL + F10.

Oh thank you very much! And no, no one else answered me on that, so yes, you're the only one! :)

You do realize that it's 2016 currently though, and even if every one of the approximately 1600 game products sold in the GOG store (probably around 1800 or so once unbundled into people's libraries as individual games) shipped 10 copies of DOSbox each, the total amount of wasted disk would add up to a combined total of about $0.10 worth of disk space with today's hard disk prices right? :)

Going to have to file this one under OCD. ;oP I haven't heard someone refer to 500MB of disk space as a "whopping" amount of space since about 1993 or 1994. Did you time travel to the future from the early 90s by chance? :oP

Most gamer input hardware such as mice and keyboards (not cheapwad bargain-bin grandma kind of hardware, but products from companies like Logitech for example) come with programmable software that let you customize your device on a per game/application basis. The software can run at OS startup time and put itself in the systray then monitor for when you launch a particular game and activate a custom profile for that specific game for you automatically. It does this by monitoring for the game's specific executable to be loaded, and while you can customize the location of the specific .exe file that is used to activate a particular profile to match a specific game, if you have multiple profiles all pointing to the same executable, the software can't tell which one of the profiles to load that you may have configured.

If all DOSbox games used one single DOSbox installation, then no matter which game you load inside that DOSbox, to the operating system the only piece of software running is DOSbox, and that is what the Logitech profiler will see - that you're running DOSbox, so you can only have one profile for it which ends up being used with all games.

If one has such hardware like this (virtually any hardware made by Logitech) and uses this optional software (Logitech Gaming Software), you must have a separate executable for each game in order for it to detect that you are running a specific game and load the correct programmable configuration customizations for that specific game. The only way for this to work is for every game to have its own unique executable to launch as Logitech software can't look inside DOSbox as to what's running in it to determine that (not in any easy way anyway).

Of course this problem doesn't affect people who do not use such software or care about it, but there are enough people out there that do that it is a problem worth not having to deal with. Surely the number of people who worry about multiple copies of DOSbox on their hard disks is much smaller than the number of people who want to be able to use custom input hardware profiles with all of their games regardless of whether they are a DOSbox game or not. :)

Aside from that though, GOG tests games with specific versions of DOSbox, and newer versions of the software may cause a given game to break, or cause other random quality control issues. It would be an extreme nightmare for them to try to use one single version of DOSbox across the entire catalogue and either never be able to change it for one single game, or to have to update every game regularly for every version of DOSbox that comes out. The only sustainable solution that is sanely supportable by GOG is to ship each game as it's own ready to use supportable all-in-one package.

It's perfectly fine for people to experiment with running GOGs games in their own custom DOSbox installs of course, but there are extremely good reasons that every GOG game ships with and installs its own private copy of DOSbox, and for all intents and purposes it should be considered a part of those games.

I suppose it is also worth noting that if someone is worried about duplicate files of multiple games filling their system, consider that there are tonnes of games that install their own private duplicate copies of DirectX 8, DirectX 9, Microsoft VC++ runtime libraries, the bink video DLLs and literally hundreds if not thousands of other duplicated DLLs and other files. There's just no sensible way imaginable for GOG to try to avoid that kind of duplication and still have supportable products, and it's also next to impossible for the end user to try to undo this duplication themselves without breaking how GOG updates work by changing each game's folders in a highly customized manner. In short it just makes the customer a lot more work for themselves over the long haul that isn't really worth the time and effort IMHO.

Besides, if someone wanted to be smart about removing disk wastage due to file level duplication, there are a few things one can do much easier than all of this. The first is to use 3rd party software to search for file duplicates on the given hard disk and replace them all with hardlinks so there is just a single copy of all of the duplicate files existing in actual allocated drive space, but multiple filesystem references all pointing to this single copy of the file.

Even though Windows does not itself provide an easy end-user way to create/remove/manipulate hardlinks (like an OS like Linux does for example), it does support them in the underlying operating system and 3rd party tools are available that can be used to make this functionality available in the GUI. I use a Windows Explorer addon called "Link Shell Extension" for example which adds the ability to create/remove/manipulate hardlinks, symlinks, junction points and a number of other admin type features to Windows Explorer. That software itself would not be a good solution to this problem however as one would have to manually scan every game directory on their own to try to find duplicates and replace them with hardlinks.

In Linux there is a program called "hardlink" written by Jakub Jelinek which does exactly what I suggest above, it can scan a hierarchy of files on a single filesystem to find absolute duplicates and optionally replace all the duplicates with hardlinks to reduce disk space wastage. Doing this removes all of the wastage but without altering the way any of the software itself works. So for example, despite the fact GOG installs separate copies of DOSbox with all the games, any identical copies of DOSbox would all be replaced by one single copy of that version by using a program like "hardlink" under Windows (I have no idea if it is available for Windows though but it is possible it might be available as part of Cygwin).

Another way to free up disk space is to selectively use Windows' built in disk compression on a per-file or per-directory basis.

The combination of these two techniques would free up tonnes more space than obsessively worrying about multiple copies of something like DOSbox ever could dream of freeing up, and with a small fraction of the administrative overhead. The only key to making it short and quick is someone interested in trying to do this to do some googling around to see if they can either find the program 'hardlink' for Windows, or some other Windows specific software that has similar functionality. I know there are tonnes of programs out there that can search your hard disks for duplicate files and delete dupes, and it just may be possible that one of them can optionally use hardlinks instead so that the duplicate filenames remain in place everywhere for applications to continue to function properly and upgrades to work right - but without making a huge mess.

Alas, I'm just the idea man planting idea seeds ... someone else has to seek out such tools themselves, but I'm sure they'll be rewarded if they decide to speak to the Google. :)

Wow, what a wall of text ;-)

The main reason to use programs like D-Fend Reloaded is that you easily can tweak and change settings and have all your games, informations and documents easy accessible in one place. You can also add windows games (of course without the option to change keyboard or mouse settings). GOG is doing a great job finding functional settings that the games run well on most machines and you don't necessary need additional programs, but the right settings can also be a very personal thing and so you want to play around with them.

Some games I prefer to play in windowed mode, others I want to play with another soundcard emulated (Gravis Ultrasound, as example) or I'm really curious if that game support tandy graphics and how it looks. Finding the right speed settings for different systems is also tricky. You can also change mouse and keyboard settings, which means if you want to play old Doom with WASD that's not a problem as DosBox has a mapper for that (which I honestly never used and so can't say how well it works).

Minimizing duplicate files is also a nice side effect, but really not most important why to use these nice programs. It's like the old days when you get a new piece of hardware and want to see how your games look, sound and run now. And yes, there are better and more efficient options to free up diskspace, but many little makes a mickle ;-) But you're right, if it's only about the disk space and you are fine with the settings GOG uses, don't bother with DOSBox frontends and enjoy your games. But if you also want to play around with the settings or want to install some old games from CDs, these programs are godsend.

Yeah, I'd like to try some of those FEs some day as well. That's a separate issue from saving space due to having multiple copies of DOSbox laying around though which is what the crux of my post was about. :)


Good to know, although I haven't hand mucked with DOSbox configs or details for quite some time other than tweaking Tomb Raider 1 to run in high resolution and mucking with simulation speed for the AITD games. Sounds like the type of software I'd probably want to tinker with under Linux though. I haven't been in much of a game-tinker mood like that for years though. :)


To be clear I'm not opposed to the idea of a DOSbox frontend, quite the opposite, such types of programs could be very useful in providing a great convenience to users, much in the same way as Steam or Galaxy or other gaming clients and launchers. My comments were mostly concerning eliminating multiple copies of DOSbox to save disk space which seems a little silly to me as it doesn't really win much, but if one's goal is to save disk space then rather than cherry picking something like DOSbox that catches the eye as having multiple copies it makes more sense to re-frame the problem as: "What would be the most effective way to free up as much space as possible on my hard disks?" and the approach I find most effective personally is to search the hard disk for the largest possible files and delete as many of them as are deemed no longer needed, to run software that searches for multiple duplicates of files based on checksum comparisons and get rid of unnecessary duplicates that don't have any consequences to getting rid of, such as duplicate backups of GOG games for example that you didn't realize you had etc. There are a number of other things I'd do also but the focus would be on finding the files that actually have the biggest impact on causing the problem I'm trying to solve or avoid.

If I wanted to optimize it then I'd do something like I described with the references to the Linux hardlink command above as that would find all remaining duplicates and deal with them in a way that is totally transparent to the software with the least amount of effort and highest level of compatibility.

DOSbox frontends are a totally different ball of wax, being a convenient tool for using DOSbox. I wouldn't consider it a utility to free up disk space though. :) If and when I try out a DOSbox frontend, I'll probably do it without touching the stock DOSbox setup GOG has if that's easily possible, or by installing the games into a separate location to play around with them there and leave any GOG installations alone. Disk space is ultra cheap so having 10 copies of an entire game installed at the same time to tinker wouldn't bother me much, and if I ran out of space I'd go spend $100 and solve the problem that way as my time is more valuable to me than wringing out all vestiges of things wasting space on my system generally speaking. :)

Nah, I did not expected that you were against frontends, just after that massive text I thought it would be nice to add some more nice things about them and to show that, beside less disk space as nice side effect, other things should be more in focus. About how to get more disk space I completely agree with you, there are better and faster options. But on the other hand, as someone who loves to tweak stuff, I also enjoy to hunt down unnecessary stuff to squeeze used disk space ;-) It's of course a waste of time, but it can feel so good if you see that after a hunt session you have 2GB more of free disk space.

Yeah, I've done the same at times in the past too and it sometimes has helped in non-trivial ways. One thing I did was scan my hard disks for various archives in ZIP, RAR and other old legacy formats and convert them all to 7z/xz archives. That saved hundreds of gigabytes so it was worth it, and the xz stuff was all automated with scripting so it didn't take much time. I didn't obsess about it all too much though. :)

I do the same ;-) Every file that comes in a zip archive I decompress and compress it again with 7z. It's also amazing to see that in some cases it also helps to compress installers. Not the installers from gog, but sometimes it helps just to run 7z for a short time over it and see if you get a good ratio.

Yep, the overwhelming amount of files I converted made enormous savings. I didn't keep statistics on it but it was rather impressive and freed up significant disk space. The only real downside was it took an incredible amount of CPU time to convert everything with all 8 CPU cores being maxed out throughout the whole process whenever I had it in action, making the computer not so responsive. :)

Except that before they had no problem with it? And the MM6 install came with one Dosbox?

And yeah, once they asked me that question it clicked and I realized what the meant. ;)

Edit: Sorry, wrong quote!