dosbox-staging Mounting improvements megaticket

@weirddan455's recent ticket reminded me of some long-standing enhancement ideas I've had with kcgen for the mount commands and auto-mounting. Also, it turns out we have a lot of mounting-related tickets in our issue tracker.

These are all somewhat related, and there is some overlap between them, so ideally, a single person would take charge of these mounting improvements. This does not mean he would solve them all, but at least triage them and come up with a plan, etc.

The most important things to address IMO are these at a high level:

Support automounting CD-ROM images (e.g., just chuck a bunch of images into drives/d in your game folder, or drives/e, drives/f etc. for games that support multiple CD-ROM drives).
Infer the -t argument whenever it can be done with a reasonably high degree of confidence. For .bin, .cue and .iso files this is trivial. For floppy images, they have fixed sizes so we can just simply look at the file size. Probably these are the most important anyway.
Logging & help text improvements. Fairly trivial, see the tickets.

All mounting related tickets

Outstanding

https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/issues/2509
https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/issues/3527
https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/issues/3305
https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/issues/2811
https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/issues/3450
https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/issues/1265
https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/issues/92
https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/issues/316
https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/issues/4562

Completed

https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/issues/3616 (problem resolved)
https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/issues/3548 (feature implemented)
https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/issues/2602 (feature implemented)
https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/issues/3030 (not a bug)

Mar 29 '24 00:03 johnnovak

I don't understand why making the Y drive read-only is better.

Mar 29 '24 02:03 Jkapp76

I don't understand why making the Y drive read-only is better.

Because the Y drive holds commands that are part of DOSBox Staging. So it's preferable if you can't delete them.

You're not supposed to put your own stuff on the Y drive, not really. That's a Staging-internal drive.

Mar 29 '24 04:03 johnnovak

I'm a rule-breaker I guess.

Mar 29 '24 04:03 Jkapp76

I'm a rule-breaker I guess.

Technically, you can do it, but why bother when you can create something like a U: drive (that's what I do, for "utilities"), then just put it into the path. Then you don't muck around with our built-in Y drive.

Mar 29 '24 04:03 johnnovak

Some more possible rules to minimise having to specify the type for mount.

.ima, .xdf and .dmf files should always be diskette images, although that could also be inferred based on image size
if the user is trying to mount on a: or b:, he is probably trying to mount a floppy disk. Useful primarily for folder mounts if floppy image detection is implemented.

Mar 29 '24 07:03 rderooy

#316

Jun 03 '24 07:06 Torinde

* [Multi-CDROM autoloading #316](https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging/issues/316)

Thanks, added to the list.

Jun 03 '24 07:06 johnnovak