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For games like these I tend to use a base Win98 image with DOSBox and then mount the game as a separate drive, disable the Windows shell, and auto start the game.

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I’m surprised nobody has created a way to automate this process - I imagine that any tool that makes it trivial would be quite popular, given what a pain it can be to set up manually.

I actually dev a project called LANCommander which can be used as a sef-hosted digital game distribution platform ala Steam, Epic Games, etc. It has built in support for redistributables. What i would actually do is make the DOSBox/Win98 combo a redist and then have the individual games require that redist.

That way if you wanted to make changes like install patches on Windows or change the DOSBox config you only have to do it to the redist.

Decided to take a look at LANCommander since it sounds interesting - looks really cool! But the website is currently giving 502 errors, so I'm only able to see the README.md

Yeah, working on rebuilding the site. The GitHub and documentation sites should be the most up to date information: https://github.com/LANCommander/LANCommander https://docs.lancommander.app/

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