Firstly, go to http://www.realmsofthehaunting.com and follow their WindowsXP/DOSBOX guide on installing ROTH from the CD”s and setting it up to run.
(If you get the error in D.O.G that says it cant work out which version of DOSBOX you have you need to download the beta exe for D.O.G from its developers forum http://erikggdog.forumup.be/forum-5-erikggdog.html (registration required) or enter the version manually when it asks you to let it detect DOSBOX, I downloaded the beta it runs fine)

Now to do away with CD swapping do the following…

1) Make a folder called “hd” in the same emulated hard disk that DOSBOX is using for ROTH…. e.g if DOSBOX mounted e:\dosboxhd as its C drive then Roth will be in “e:\dosboxhd\ROTH” so put hd in as “e:\dosboxhd\hd”

2) Copy the entire contents of CD1 to the “hd” folder

3) Then move onto CD2, 3 and 4 (CD”s 2, 3 and 4 have the same folders and some of the same files as CD1) ignore everything on these disks apart from the GDV folder (this contains all the movie files) copy the contents of each GDV folder from 2, 3 and 4 into the hd folder”s GDV folder, you will be asked if you want to replace “TUNNWARP.GDV” for each disk just say no as its already in GDV from CD1.

4) Go to the hd folder you have made and open up the DATA folder, then open “FILELIST.TXT” in notepad, skip past DISK1″s list and goto “DISK2”. Remove the lines in DISK2’s list that say “dbase300.dat” , “dbase500.dat” and “tunnwarp.gdv”. Do the same for DISK”s 3 and 4 list”s. Please be sure you do not have any repeating file names throughout the entire file! (I used notepad”s find and replace function and just replaced with a space then just took out the blank lines afterwards). Do make sure you have ONE and only one of each of the following in the file “dbase300.dat” , “dbase500.dat” and “tunnwarp.gdv”.
Then remove the words, “DISK2={“, “DISK3={” and “DISK4={“, also make sure you remove the closing “}” for each disk apart from the very last one at the end of the list.
You should now have a long continuous list of files starting with “DISK1={” and ending in “}” (i.e there should only be one “{” at the beginning next to “DISK1=” and one “}” at the end of the list, in the entire file). Make sure you save this file using notepad (File -> Save).

5) Almost done…. Now go into the ROTH folder that was installed while setting up the game in DOSBOX (That would be “E:\dosboxhd\ROTH” if “E:\dosboxhd” is your DOSBOX emulated C drive). Open up “CONFIG.INI” in notepad and change “SourcePath” from “D:\” to “C:\hd”. Click file and save in notepad and close the file.

6) (Optional) Now ROTH no longer needs a CD drive to run the game you can remove it from the “Realms of the Haunting.conf” file created while setting up DOSBOX, the D.O.G front end and ROTH from the previous guide. To do this simply remove the line that reads “mount d “l:\” -ioctl -t cdrom” from the [autoexec] section towards the bottom of the file (“l:\” is my CD drive this will probably be different for you). Remember to click file and save in the notepad, then close. (Another way to make this change would be to remove the CD drive in the D.O.G front end and save the profile)

That should be it you should now be able to load ROTH from the D.O.G front end or however you wish to load it through DOSBOX and not have a CD swap in sight.

If I find a bug in this guide or any performance increases I will repost it with the changes, also please post if you find any problems and ill try and help you out.

Conversion by: spee2k8