What's in the box? Why, it's crammed full of DOS! That's right, the DOSBox Staging team has released a new version of their wonderful tool that keeps so many of us playing classic DOS games today. 0.83.0 sounds like a huge improvement. Some of these features, quoted below from their release notes, will have a huge impact on how you play Wing Commander. In particular, full SC-55 emulation will be a boon to anyone playing Privateer, Armada or Wing Commander III with MIDI music… and a built-in FMV deinterlacer sure seems like magic!
- 100% authentic Roland Sound Canvas SC-55 emulation via Nuked-SC55. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve bagged this long-coveted trophy of DOS gaming! I really couldn’t tell the difference between our emulation and the hardware SC-55 unit sitting on my desk during extensive A/B tests!
- Authentic CRT colour emulation to take another big step towards faithfully emulating those miniature particle accelerators, also known as CRT monitors, on our modern flat screens! 😎
- Image adjustment controls to tweak the brightness, contrast, saturation, colour temperature, etc. settings, just like on a real CRT monitor.
- Totally overhauled frame presentation that achieves better out-of-the-box results with proper VRR and vsync support in most circumstances. The new system is much simpler — the old presentation settings seemed to give everyone a headache.
- Wide-gamut monitor support to achieve even better CRT-like results, and playing DOS games with radioactive colours on DCI-P3 displays is just not fun.
- FMV deinterlacer to do those campy full-motion video 90s adventure games justice on modern screens. Yes, you can combine deinterlacing with any shader, including the CRT shaders.
- Checkerboard dedither to remove dithering not just from those old EGA Sierra adventures, but from any DOS game on any graphics adapter (we just had to one-up ScummVM, hadn’t we? 😎 🤘). Again, you can combine dedithering with any shader.
- A comprehensive user manual that goes beyond a reference guide: it covers basic concepts through detailed device configuration, and offers a historical overview of the DOS era for users who didn’t live through it.
- HTTP API to muck around with the emulated memory and DOS internals to write modding and cheat tools as simple single-page web applications. The first one to reimplement Gold Box Companion using this API gets a prize! 😎 ⚔ 🧙♂️ 🪄 🐲
- Floppy and CD-ROM automounting to make setting up games even easier.
- Disk noise emulation as there’s something oddly satisfying about listening to HDD and floppy drive chatter while a game loads.
- Improved mouse emulation, including proper 2-button mouse emulation support, and added several game-specific hacks, such as a fix for the jerky/uneven mouse pointer movement issue in Ultima Underworld I & II.
- Clipboard support to allow copy/pasting text between the DOS prompt and the host operating system.
- A large number of DOS command improvements, such as merging the IMGOUNT and MOUNT commands, a new MAKEIMG command for creating disk images, a new supercharged MEM command, and many other small enhancements.
- DOSBox Staging now uses a gettext compatible *.po translation file format. This makes translation work a lot easier, and allows the use of specialised translation-aiding software, such as the well-known Poedit.
- Several locale handling improvements, in particular, making the locale autodetection work more reliably with less surprises.
They've also put together a comprehensive new manual that will surely help demystify the software for users that maybe aren't quite tech savvy enough to know what a loadfix is. (Does anyone know what a loadfix is?)
