First post, by Alexander
Next problem a user has reported to me:
DOSBox and Windows seem to use different ways for making short file names. (Ok, in my opinion it's much better to use short names for the directories used inside a DOSBox drive but anyway.)
The user who has reported the issue to me uses the two folders "Prince of Persia" and "Prince of Persia 2". He has created the "Prince of Persia 2" folder first and than the "Prince of Persia" folder. So Windows uses this translation:
"Prince of Persia 2" -> PRINCE~1
"Prince of Persia" -> PRINCE~2
(To see the short name you can type "dir /x" on the Windows command line.) But DOSBox is ignoring this and adding the ~1, ~2, etc. in alphabetical order:
"Prince of Persia" -> PRINCE~1
"Prince of Persia 2" -> PRINCE~2
If the root folder of "Prince of Persia ?" is mounted as a drive a frontend (or even the user if he isn't using any help) needs to "cd" to the right PRINCE~? folder. For doing this I would need to reimplement to DOSBox translation logic. Wouldn't it be much easier to use the Windows API function
DWORD GetShortPathName(
LPCTSTR lpszLongPath,
LPTSTR lpszShortPath,
DWORD cchBuffer
);
for getting the short names ? The only thing against this I could imagine could be this would require some conditional compilation for different plattforms. But the benefit would me much less user confusion by having two different ways of making short directory names. - Just a suggestion.
(Oh, of course also tested on DOSBox 0.72 and the current CVS build from cvscompile.aep-emu.de.)