Looking for a portable frontend

[audiodane]

The ultimate goal I'm going for is a USB stick where there is nothing to install, just plug it in and have a menu or something pop up asking which game you want to play. I use a lot of different computers and don't always have access to or want to install anything, but in some free time would love to play some games.

I'm looking at both D-Fend Reloaded and CBoxRun right now, they both looked to be fairly portable (relative path naming for one) and also supported unique dosbox.conf files for each game. The downfalls to fancy frontends are that those that are easier to design & build will have dependencies like .NET or JAVA which make it slightly less than portable if a random machine I'm able to use in fact doesn't have the particular version of .NET or JAVA that is necessary. However an application that is "truly" self contained will either sacrifice a LOT of features (boxart, GUI friendliness, etc) or be VERY big (dependencies compiled-in).

Actually, I wouldn't mind the latter option, it's not like I'm trying to "save space" when putting ALL my old games in one place (USB stick).. A significantly large executable or locally-included .DLLs are perfectly fine. To my knowledge neither JAVA nor .NET support "portable" installations...do they?

Specifically to DFR and CBR, I was interested in both of them for not only their portability (dependencies aside for the moment) but also for their support for each game to have a different dosbox.conf file. DFR supports what looks like "profiles" which seem to be dosbox.conf files that are emulating specific machines (8086, 286, 386, etc). While that makes sense, that's not currently how I have my games setup. Currently each game has its own dosbox.conf file. Though I could adapt my particular methods to the method that DFR uses, it would be "quicker" (albeit maybe also "dirtier") if I could just point DFR to my existing dosbox.conf file for each game entry. But I can't figure where/how to do that.

And CBR has a context-sensitive (right-click) option for each game to CREATE a custom dosbox.conf file for each game, but nowhere can you tell it to point to and/or read an EXISTING dosbox.conf file for each game. Doesn't make much sense to me?

I would be happy to settle for a batch file that scans each folder off a certain path (e.g. ".\games") and for each sub-directory creates a real-time dynamic list of the games currently available, maybe by each folder having a particular file (e.g. "runme.bat"). It certainly wouldn't be very pretty, but it would be awfully consistent. (each "runme.bat" would be therefore responsible for invoking DOSBox with the proper parameters, making maintenance probably a nightmare.)

I don't want to embark on yet another frontend and duplicate the efforts of coders far more skilled than I, but I also haven't found that "right" frontend for my use-case.

Let the suggestions begin!

..dane

[Collector]

I was shocked at how deeply Defend Reloaded sunk its roots into the system. For a USB stick I would highly recommend DOSBox Game Launcher, or DBGL. It is written in Java and is designed for portability, both in terms of platform and it terms of "Protable Apps" or thumb drive portability. It uses relative paths, so they won't be broken when moving to another machine.

[audiodane]

I will look into that, thanks Collector.

Do you know if there is a self-contained/portable version of Java that can be extracted onto a USB stick? I envision using my game stick on computers where I will not have admin access. I saw something on google about a "portable apps Java" but it still uses an installer, which just seems odd to me. Why not just an archive that I can extract to my thumb drive?

thanks,
..dane

[Collector]

I would not think that the Java run time itself could be made portable, but I have never look into it.