I'm back!
I played a couple of games on stars autohost in ca 2005, and this Autumn, I met up with another guy on a board game convention here in norway, and we talked about stars and how we and a couple of other Norwegians played a couple of games together some long time ago.
Well, it ended up with us four actually setting up a game again, using Google drive to store the game files, and I myself, not having Windows 7 on my laptop (to play stars in xp mode) but Windows 8, installed good old Windows 3.1 on my dosbox to make it running (ah, the good old days ).
Well, long story short, we have played until 2406, but now when I open the hst-file, I just get a Message saying that "The X are not on the right year" for EVERY player.
I tried copying the hst-file from the backup-directory, but the problem persists.
Anyone who can help us with this problem? I really liked stars back in the days, and I still do (read a lot of threads to brush up on old strategy before this game), so I would really like to play this game through.
When we are finished with this game, and if we don't decide to start another one just after the first, I think I'd like to try another autohost game again, if there are any games starting nowadays, but first we must solve our problems with this game, so that I will not forsake stars altogether...

when I open the hst-file, I just get a Message saying that "The X are not on the right year" for EVERY player.

Try a Google search of this site for the exact wording of the error message. I tried but didn't get anything...perhaps the exact wording is a little different than what you typed out?

We have now moved the files to dropbox and so far so good.

make sure to wait until the Dropbox systray icon shows the green check mark,

Isn't there an option to "save now" in Dropbox?

When you generated the turn in step 3, the hst file tried to copy the .x files to a BACKUP folder, but there wasn't one to be found under the new folder.
Therefore the .x files from year Z are still in the game folder, and the host is warning you that those x files are from the incorrect year.

Solution:
Create a BACKUP folder manually in the new location. Copy the .x files from year Z to that folder if you like. The host file will use that folder from now on.

Dropbox provides a constant cloud synch. When a file changes, Dropbox synchronizes that change with the cloud. The only delay is the network, not Dropbox waiting on something.

...But didn't Stars! use to automatically create a BACKUP folder if one didn't already exist?

skoormit wrote on Mon, 20 January 2014 22:52

Dropbox provides a constant cloud synch. When a file changes, Dropbox synchronizes that change with the cloud. The only delay is the network, not Dropbox waiting on something.

But it probably mimics that "constant synch" thru some kind of polling every few seconds. And when closing everything in a hurry one doesn't always have the luxury of waiting for an unknown number of seconds until the "network" does its thing.

Google/Gmail knows. And they provide the easiest fix.

m.a@stars wrote on Wed, 22 January 2014 13:35

...But didn't Stars! use to automatically create a BACKUP folder if one didn't already exist?

It does the first time you gen, but if you later move the .hst file it does not create a new BACKUP folder in the new place. At least, that's the behavior I just observed. It might vary based on Stars.ini settings as well.

I've never noticed a delay of even one second between me saving a file and Dropbox starting the synch job.

There is a delay after starting my VM, though. For some reason, Dropbox doesn't sync right away when I start the VM. That delay might be a minute or more. I don't know how long it is, because I always force Dropbox out of that delay by pausing and restarting syncing. Perhaps that is the technique you are looking for.