I just uploaded a video on youtube where you can see what I have been doing in the last couple of days.
This is DOSbox integrated into Commander Genius called Dosbox Fusion, the engine working with that stuff. Most of the DOSBox code is untouched but some major stuff has been improved and fixed etc.
Take a look here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr5S36v0fzU
Which features are different to the original DOSBox you may ask and this is just the beginning of awesomeness. Well...
Features so far:
1.- Game launcher (Game Hub, like tulip mentions it), Nothing new for us, but you put your DOS game into the directory of where the other games are detected and launch it with Dosbox fusion. You won't need to to type any DOS command. DB Fusion will launch the game for you. If it detects multiple EXEs or BATs, it will ask which one it should execute. Of course you still can open a DOS Shell and you do have the typing of neat commands.
2.- Rendering engine is taken by CG. With that change we hopefully get a much smoother experience on the keen games and mods. I think it already helped a bit so far. All the cycling of the emulated CPU is preserved through a nice other thread within the app. of course the games in that engine aren't that smooth scrolling as our CG Engine used for Vorticon and Galaxy games, but maybe that is the whole charm.
3.- SDL2 support. Yeah, with all that together you will get the SDL 1.2 and 2.0 builds. Both libs work with that, no problem.
4.- Video config. Stretch your window as you please, use any of our aspect ratios, go Fullscreen, use our filters, like the ScaleX (2x, 3x, 4x) and more.
5.- Full support of DOSbox emulated hardware, so your games have no limits as you know it and your mods work as you wish. That is the most important feature I guess. Of course you can play any other DOS game on this, but the question is, do you want so... I played Biomenace a couple of days ago, well, yeah, it works as expected and loads pretty well.
Future of that scramble:
There are still a lot of bugs left I'm hunting down and we need a nice menu for the configuration within the dosbox fusion engine.
I'm thinking about a smoked glass design for that, and I also want to support profiles which are auto detected.
Those auto-detected profiles will enhance certain games a bit more. For example a Keen Dreams profile could patch music in somehow or put a more apropiate cycles count or cpu behavior for that game.
Also Joystick supported doesn't work. I want to remove that feature and map joystick buttons to emulated keyboard keys. Not sure, if that is a good idea, but I'm pretty sure it makes some games more playable and you won't have to calibrate that device all the time. I hated to do that in the past. Another DOS charm we had back then,
Also to support game states where you can load or save at any point of your game would be nice. You already can use the built-in save and load feature the games provide, but you know: A gamestate for any dosgame outside that emulation would be better, because you are not limited to the system of the game.
Those are just some ideas I can think of, but honestly it could relive the awesomeness of those cool old DOS games which are run on modern systems.
Now tell me here, what do you think about it? What could we do better or how do you like that progress or the very idea?
Let me know below this not so short text.
Together we can make that project even better.