I decided to make use of the Christmas break/lockdown period by finally playing through Byzantine: The Betrayal, a 1990s first-person whodunit adventure PC game I first set my eyes on twenty years ago but never found the time to play. It won’t run on a legacy Windows XP machine I maintain specifically for ancient software, so it’s now running under a Windows 95 emulation in DOSBox. Basically, I have a desktop icon on my Windows 10 computer which, if clicked, will launch a virtual Windows 95 machine, and within that machine I will see a virtual desktop that allows me to launch the game.
With the break now nearly over, but the game not yet completed, I’d like to transfer this to another Windows 10 desktop PC that I have in another location. I can install the same DOSBox emulation there, but I’d like to take the saved game files with me so I can continue the game on the new PC. Is there an elegant way to extract the file from within the emulation and bring it into the emulation on the other computer?
It’s got to be in a file somewhere. It might be that the emulator stores all of its internal state in a single file or something, and that it only shows up as multiple files inside of the emulator… but if that’s the case, then you can transfer over that single file. More likely, I think, the emulator would use the file structure of the native system to represent the file structure of the emulated system, and so somewhere there would be a just plain save-game file.
Basically, if I couldn’t figure out anything more detailed, I would just copy over absolutely everything in the DOSbox installation except for the DOSbox exe itself.
I’m not familiar with DOSBox, but in all machine emulators that I’m familiar with, the emulator uses a single file on the host system to represent the entire disk in the emulated system. If you’re going to run DOSBox on another system, you should be able to copy the file representing the disk to the new system and tell DOXBox to use it there. Then the new emulated system will have the same filesystem as the old emulated system did.
Alternatively, most emulators I’ve used, such as VirtualBox, have a way to share a directory between the host system and the emulated system. You could use this mechanism to copy the individual game save files from the emulated system to the host, and the on the new machine copy them from the host to the emulated system. This would require knowing more about the game and where it saves its files, so the first approach is probably preferable.
DOSbox does not use a single file to emulate a virtual disk. It runs programs stored in normal directories on the filesystem of the host operating system. There is no extra step required to share a directory.
I thought that might be the case, given that DOS and Windows share a familiar relationship (and therefore have a greater degree of similarity under the hood than most OSs).
That is the wrong way to look at it. DOSBox runs just fine under Linux, Mac OS, etc. It does not really care what the underlying filesystem looks like under the hood (nor is it true that the Windows NTFS or ReFS filesystems are similar to old DOS filesystems), it just reads directories via the operating system like any other application.
Assuming you used the save feature inside the game it should be as simple as installing DosBox on the new computer then copying the folder containing the old game to the new computer.
The emulated game will recognize it’s own save game files in the folder.
Barebones DOSBox will start up with an emulated Z: drive. You can then grant access to a directory tree on your own machine by using the ‘mount’ command. For example ‘mount C D:\Games’ will map an emulated C: drive to your D:\Games subdirectory. If you then type ‘c:’ in the DOSBox command prompt you will have access to the entire D:\Games subdirectory tree as if it were the C: drive.
There’s a way to automate the mounting process (and more) using a configuration file. The way OP describes how he starts his Win95 emulation by clicking on a desktop icon, that is undoubtedly what’s happening here. Just figure out what configuration file is being read by DOSBox. Said configuration file is in plaintext, so just open it up in Notepad or your favorite text editor and look for the ‘[autoexec]’ section (probably at the end of the file) to find out what DOSBox is doing when it launches. Look for the ‘mount’ command and you’ll see which subdirectory on your physical drive is being mapped. Hopefully you can take it from there.