Gender Wars - please help before I kill something
 

OK so I've got the Gender Wars CD, correctly burned, etc. Obviously on my Win XP machine it doesn't autoplay, but after messing around a little I managed to install with no real problems. Then, after a second bout of major screwing around I remembered the subst.bat I used the last time I managed to run this game properly. However, now whenever I try to run it, whether in DOSBox or XP, I get the same issue - "CD-ROM not installed" and it won't play. What's the deal? The CD is in the drive...obviously it doesn't like XP but how do I point it in the right direction? Is it worth giving FakeCD a shot?

A bit more details would be extremely helpful to pinpoint where it goes wrong .....

Dosbox version?
Did you install the game in dosbox?
Your mount lines in dosbox?
Inputs to setup the game?
Inputs to run the game?
...... ?
You know, details, and more details.......

I should've known all that...honestly, total noob moment.

I ran install from the CD in DOSBox 0.72, then I tried to run the game with the following .bat in Windows -

subst x: c:\
gw.exe
subst x: /d

I tried running that from Windows and from DOSBox but either way the same happens - it looks as if it's going to start but then it goes to "CD-ROM not installed" and back to the command line.

I'm using the following mount procedure -

mount c c:\games

mount d d:\ -t cdrom

cd GW

GW.bat

Where am I going wrong?

Hmmm, your dosbox mounts seem OK to me, so let us look at another possible screwup ....
Now you see, that 'etc' looks really interesting.
You've got Gender wars CD, you downloaded it, what format was it? (ISO-BIN/CUE .....?)
You burned it, I'm interested in HOW you burned it, and please don't respond with 'correctly burned', because there is more then one way to create a worthless frisbee burning an image.
Again :details please.

Somewhere it went completely wrong, I know for a fact that Gender Wars runs fine in dosbox 0.72.

When using the subst command, you need to type the complete directory from where you want the CD to originate. Not x: or c:\. Just like in DOSBox.

And I seriously doubt that it would work if you do not select d:\ as your cd rom drive.

When I say correctly burned, I mean that if I put it in the CD tray it now shows up in D:\ as "Gender" with an icon rather than just the date or discname. As for what image type it was, it came straight from this very website's own ISO cellar in .NRG format, which I then converted to ISO and burned using UltraISO, all of which ran smoothly with no errors.

And yes, I know Gender Wars runs fine in DOSBox 0.72, I've done it before. This is what's so infuriating.

it's possible that you've installed the game from within some weird dosbox cdrom configuration and now it looks into wrong drive

Instead of running GW.bat, run GW.exe

I've tried that, Fifth. It doesn't work, that's why I wrote the .bat in the first place. Last time I got this game to run I used a similar batch file.

Try making an ISO of the CD and mounting it with IMGMOUNT.