Did i say that was a problem?

well, you insulted me, if that counts

I even told you the solution.

No, no you didn't. You told me a workaround that, hadn't you assumed I'm a complete moron (which seems to be your picture of your average "customer") you knew I was already aware of

well, you insulted me, if that counts

No, doesn't count.

No, no you didn't. You told me a workaround

Which is a solution.

hydr0x wrote:

No, no you didn't. You told me a workaround

wd wrote:

Which is a solution.

That's you killing two birds with one stone 😉
I'm getting off-topic, but I hadn't realised until I saw your 'Red Alert' example that the game has been released as freeware! Thanks for the hint, I'm downloading right now. 😁

wd wrote:

Use KEEN1 to KEEN9

Well, Keen 7 to Keen 9 got never released :-P

Now that's strange!

hydr0x,

Are your hard drives formatted using NTFS ?

If so, maybe you could also consider this command (it takes effect after rebooting the machine):

fsutil behavior set disable8dot3 1

It will disable short names in Windows. But be aware that old programs that rely on those short names will probably malfunction!

You can revert back to the standard behavior this way:

fsutil behavior set disable8dot3 0

EDIT: It seems that you can also use that command on FAT32 drives. I haven't personally tested it, though.

And remember that it will only disable the creation of short names for future files and directories. Existing ones will not be modified in any way.

More info here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/200 … /20/440918.aspx

Regards.

Thanks, I'll look into it. I don't have any 16-bit applications running but I'm not sure whether this is a good idea. And if it has anything to do with the problem at all?! If either DOSBox or D-Fend RL uses this Windows' functionality to create the dir names I'm sure running into more problems, aren't I? Oh well, I'll wait for DFRL 0.7 in any case before trying to go another route of solving the probem. I'm hopeful it either fixes the bug or allows for the subfolder solution presented above 😀

dosbox doesn't use the lowlevel functions. I think DFRL does currently (with some renaming).

Leolo wrote:

EDIT: It seems that you can also use that command on FAT32 drives. I haven't personally tested it, though.

I don't think this works. The FAT32 file system requires the SFN entries to store the usual file info (starting cluster, file size, attributes, ...), not just the short name.

I've seen alot of cases where users have a very long directory structure where short file names were the ONLY way to fix file access issues:

Ex: C:\Files\Publications\Name of Parent Company\Name of sub company\Name of team in company - State\Name of Company - TOPS\NAME OF SYSTEM TOPS\Strange mix of characters.

The above example is a VERY simplified version. Usually there's alot of other characters mixed in each subfolder and the path is twice as long.....

So yeah, don't disable short file names.

At the moment DFR uses the GetShortPathName Windows API function at least in two areas:

1. Making short names for cd commands inside DOSBox (via autoexec section). - This will hopefully (still not started working on this) not needed anymore in 0.6.0.

2. Creating the mount commands because the DOSBox command line is limited to 134 chars in 0.72. (Because I have heared next DOSBox version will not have this limit anymore, there is already a swich to turn this off in the setup dialog).

This means using next version of DFR together with DOSBox >0.72 should be able to work with short names turned off.

In general I think more programs using short names in some ways than one would think of. For example one can think of an application trying to check if a user given path is similar to an other path and the program don't know if the user given path is short (perhaps because the path is given via the command line and not chosen from a Windows file select dialog). So the program could try to make the internal path short and compare this with the user path, too. And I don't know if such a program would handle a "There is no short name" error from GetShortPathName the right way. So even if you are running 32Bit-Windows7-applications only some could rely on the existence of short names.