DOSBox is about to get more advanced, with the community-made 'soft' fork dosbox-staging have a first proper release out. Made as an attempt to reinvigorate DOSBox development, it has a very admirable aim.
The point, they say, is to provide a better experience than the standard DOSBox and hopefully get their work into the upstream project to improve it for everyone.
Today, dosbox-staging 0.75 was officially released, here's some highlights:
- Upgraded to use SDL 2.0 - bringing with it improved input handling, low-latency audio using OpenSL ES, more output interfaces such as Wayland and much more.
- Support FLAC, Opus, and MP3 CD-DA tracks.
- Pixel-perfect scaling mode.
- Resizable window.
- 64-bit Dynamic Recompilation - "Support for 64-bit dynarec improves CPU emulation speed and quality across the board - this is especially visible to Linux and macOS users".
- It now complies with the XDG Base Directory Specification.
- Plus loads more you can see the release notes here.
DOSBox is a truly an essential bit of free and open source software, one that keeps some truly classic games alive and so it's important that it's in good shape itself as operating systems themselves grow and evolve so DOSBox needs to keep up with it all too.
See more about dosbox-staging on the official site and GitHub.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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The comments on this article are closed.
How does it compare to DOSbox-ECE?
Last edited by Curupira on 6 May 2020 at 2:29 pm UTC
Last edited by Curupira on 6 May 2020 at 2:29 pm UTC
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Quoting: CurupiraHow does it compare to DOSbox-ECE?ECE is not really a fork, but rather a collection of important patches (for users it does not matter, but it means ECE cannot improve on code inherited from SVN - unlike dosbox-staging, which is "proper" open-source project).
Out of patches distributed via ECE:
- We include pixel-perfect mode (this feature was removed from ECE; code author is dosbox-staging maintainer)
- We include a better version of CD-DA work (author is also dosbox-staging maintainer)
- Integrated NukedOPL already
- Scalers 4x and higher are not needed any more since glshader=sharp is integrated now
- We provide a number of features not available in SVN nor ECE (see changelog), most importantly moved on to SDL2
What we're missing from ECE:
- FluidSynth integration (we'll work on this for next stable release)
- MT-32 integration (in plans)
- 3dfx emulation (work is slowly starting)
- "Improved" PC speaker emulation - we won't integrate this, this work is unfinished, borderline broken
Other patches distributed by ECE are really trivial changes, we'll integrate them sooner or later ;)
Overall ECE is an extremely important project, as it kept alive these important out-of-tree patches for years - we're taking them, cleaning up, improving, and properly integrating into dosbox-staging code (one by one).
17 Likes, Who?
legluondunet May 6, 2020
This new project looks very good! A lot of new modern features for Dosbox!
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Yaumeister May 6, 2020
Hopefully this will better coordinate all the efforts from different DOSBOX variants into a single branch, and perhaps a prebuilt deb release for lazy Ubuntu folks like me?
I use this at the moment and has MT-32 support via munt.
https://code.launchpad.net/~i30817/+archive/ubuntu/dosbox-patched
I use this at the moment and has MT-32 support via munt.
https://code.launchpad.net/~i30817/+archive/ubuntu/dosbox-patched
1 Likes, Who?
Quoting: dreamer_I was wondering, and then seeing you here clearly involved gives me a hint that the answer is fairly positive--so, what's the relationship between this and Boxtron?Quoting: CurupiraHow does it compare to DOSbox-ECE?ECE is not really a fork, but rather a collection of important patches (for users it does not matter, but it means ECE cannot improve on code inherited from SVN - unlike dosbox-staging, which is "proper" open-source project).
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Quoting: dreamer_
@dreamer_, what are the chances of eventually merging your changes to the original dosbox? Or merging those two projects? Is dosbox development completely dead - so dead, that it can't be even revived? Can you share some background regarding this? I'm extremely happy for your project, because I long felt that dosbox was missing user friendly features (like window resizing). But of course it would be even better if you could the same change in the original project instead of starting a new one.
2 Likes, Who?
Great, I was waiting for XDG base dir support in DosBox for a long time. Switch to SDL 2 is also a major plus.
Last edited by Shmerl on 6 May 2020 at 4:51 pm UTC
Last edited by Shmerl on 6 May 2020 at 4:51 pm UTC
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Quoting: ripperQuoting: dreamer_
@dreamer_, what are the chances of eventually merging your changes to the original dosbox? Or merging those two projects? Is dosbox development completely dead - so dead, that it can't be even revived? Can you share some background regarding this? I'm extremely happy for your project, because I long felt that dosbox was missing user friendly features (like window resizing). But of course it would be even better if you could the same change in the original project instead of starting a new one.
>..what are the chances of eventually merging your changes..
The chances are nil. There is a lot of bad blood between the staging developers and dosbox developers.
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