I have tested quite extensively this distro and it holds real potential. It is much more performance consistent than a typical DosBox running on top of a normal operating system, with multiple apps and background processes. Graphics and CPU emulation speed is nearly on par with Windows DosBox classic.

The graphics output quality and input lag are both very good, which is important when you resort to emulation.

I noticed and I understand why the distro works like that. First of all the distro is TCE (Tiny Core Linux with Extensions). It is a good choice. As far as I looked into the repository it seems that no newer Dosbox was released for the platform. Although it is quite difficult to customize, the DosBox configuration can be modified as needed if you go into the archives and search for obvious clues. The most important improvement, however, is to make the implementation of a recent Dosbox such as Dosbox-X in this distro.

A short question, I visted github, followed the dropbox link, and downloaded DBD_BETA.iso .
Then I tried to boot within VMware Workstation Player 16, and was surprised that the DOSBOX window at the end is soooo small.
Using the "fullscreen" option in VMware WP did not resized the DOSBOX window, still stayed in the same size.
Because the ISO starts straight into DOSBOX (without any stop in a linux shell), how can I influence the size of the DOSBOX window/screen ?

Are the VMware additions or at least the video driver installed?

If I know what in VMWare listed Linux distro fits with the here choosen TinyCoreLinux (is it debian based?), I would try again. I've tested it with Ubuntu (as the preselection for the OS).
Also, I am not sure I would be able to install the VMware additions if there is no OS access (instead, just DOSBOX).

Is there a way to make this boot straight to dbdmenu ? Or any way of automation into an exe/bat
I did try edit the SDA/dosbox/startup.bat but save failed
I was able to edit the sda1/dosbox/startup.bat but it made no difference.

I'm a bit lost to be honest as even putting the stick into a Linux distro doesn't show the SDA startup.bat 😂

Thanks

My only thoughts on posting a direct image is whatever size drive I use, that’s the size the user would be stuck with unless they are comfortable with gparted or another partioning utility. Am I wrong?

I once made a boot CD that emulates a hard drive. It has a bunch of goodies on it including DOS. When it loaded, it loaded a ramdrive utility (can't remember the name now, but it wasn't XMSDSK because that didn't quite work with Windows 95 version of DOS). But the point of loading the ramdrive is to make access to the files faster. So essentially, on CD boot, all the files got copied over via xcopy or xcopy32 to the ramdrive. The entire contents weighed in at about 64MB.

Perhaps you can do a similar thing with your setup. when USB boots, check to see that the main hard drive exists then copy files over. but in DOSBOX the hard drive should exist anyway.

Another idea which could work is to use pkware's pkzip utility and zip2exe to make a DOS self-extracting image of the whole filesystem and save it as the EXE generated from zip2exe on the USB. This has the advantage of less bytes to transfer between devices (so somewhat of speed)

Nubcake here: does this concept only work as a liveusb or could you replicate it with a full linux install, like on a formatted netbook?

Greetings,

I would like to update this distro since Microcore is in 13.0 version. Is there and tutorial to show how I can create a USB media with all necessary applications?

This is something I'm interested in as well. "Remastering" TC (making a custom version of the OS) is a big part of the whole purpose of it, so there is lots of info on remastering in general, even if there's no specific one for DosBoxDistro. One day when I have time for such things 😭 I hope to read through what's on the Tiny Core wiki and use one of the remastering tools to extract DBD's iso and make a more stripped-down version without many of the extra utils. The other avenue which I'm going down is just creating a bog-standard tiny core plus 'frugal' install on a netbook's hard drive and getting it to run DOSBox full screen with scaling, but I'm struggling with getting openGL to work