I've recently purchased some DOS games here on GOG but haven't yet gotten around to installing them. I have noticed, whilst testing the installers themselves, that there is an option to choose whether or not to install DOSBox with the games or just install the game itself.

So, my question is this. Can I just install the game itself and not DOSBox and if so does it simply create the game folder with the game files in it just as if it had been installed from retail disc?

The reason I ask is that I may choose to install the latest version of DOSBox separately and use one DOSBox to run all the DOS games rather than have an instance of it with every GOG DOS game. Anyone have any advice?

It just installs the game files in the default install directory without DOSBox. You can use the game files with your own DOSBox installation, but you might have to do a bit of custom configuring to get them to work their best.

Do you know if there's any way to get at GOG's DOSBox configuration files then? I reckon I may need to look into how to set up DOSBox config files for each game then, rather than any global settings.

Well, just found out that GOG's installers (at least the one for Rise of the Triad anyway) don't let you install without either choosing their DOSBox option or by specifying a location for your own DOSBox.

So I guess this answers the question itself. However, as you can't solve your own questions and I do like to have questions marked as solved, I'm giving the credit to Narushima because they suggested just installing with DOSBox anyway.

EDIT:
Have now found out that even with a manually installed DOSBox 0.74, GOG's installer won't recognise it when you specify it as the DOSBox installation folder (see screenshot). Any ideas?

Anybody can solve this? I also interested to know.

The GOG installer often oly recognises the same DOSbox version that shipped with the game. That is, if the game ships with 0.72, the installer will only recognise 0.72, not 0.74.

so is gog gonna update the installer in the future? I don't think dosbox v 0.72 is much difference than v 0.74 though.

You can get the GOG DOSbox configuration by using "innounp" to extract the installer (or Univeral Extractor, which uses this program and provides a GUI).

It's under the "{tmp}" folder after extraction.

after modified the config what should i do? how can i compile the whole folder as installer again?

You'd be wrong

http://dosbox.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/dosbox/?view=log

Sorry, I don't know. I extract the installers to install the games "properly" on my Arch Linux system, so I have no need to recompile the changes.

And if anyone is curious to how my setup works, I use the PKGBUILD system from Arch to extract the game files from the installer, modify the DOSbox configuration to my preferences (mainly, to disable fullscreen), install the game to /usr/local/games and a wrapper script to /usr/bin, which utilises unionfs-fuse to handle the read-only nature of the game installation directory by doing a copy-on-write to a directory in the users home directory.

One way to install DOSBox GOGs with a single DOSBox install, is to temporarily downgrade the DOSBox to the version that the GOG installer is looking for.

1. When you already have DOSBox installed, back up DOSBox.exe to somewhere else (desktop, for example), copy over the same file from an older DOSBox version (depending on what the installer expects), replacing the one you have installed.
2. Install the GOG game, pointing it to your DOSBox installation folder.
3. Copy back your backed-up DOSBox.exe

It's a small pain to do every time you want to install a game though, but I believe it's currently the easiest "solution".

TQ, now my Timeshock can use the version 0.74 dosbox.