After two years of development, the release of DOSBox Staging 0.81 has been published, enhancing the cross-platform emulator for the MS-DOS environment, written using the SDL library and designed to run old DOS games on Linux, Windows, and macOS. DOSBox Staging is developed by a separate team and is not connected with the original DOSBox, which has seen only minor changes in recent years. The code is written in C++ and is distributed under the GPLv2+ license.
The main goal of the project is to ensure that old games run effectively on modern systems (there is a separate fork, dosbox-x, for hardware emulation). DOSBox Staging also aims to provide a user-friendly product, simplify the involvement of new developers (for example, by using Git instead of SVN), expand functionality, initially focus on DOS games, and support modern platforms. The project does not aim to provide support for outdated systems like Windows 9x and OS/2, nor to concentrate on hardware emulation from the DOS era.
In the new release:
- Built-in emulation of CRT monitors has been implemented, requiring no manual configuration.
- The code has been restructured to support VGA, providing full emulation of interlaced scanning and double scanning.
- Options for integer scaling have been added, allowing images to be stretched to full screen, using arbitrary aspect ratio factors, and emulating monitor controls to stretch images vertically or horizontally.
- Screenshot creation in multithreaded mode has been implemented, with a correct aspect ratio set by default.
- Video capture performance has increased by approximately three times.
- Support for emulating the 3dfx Voodoo 1 video card has been added.
- Support for emulating the IBM Music Feature Card sound card has been added. Enhanced support for Roland MT-32 sound device firmware. Improved MIDI support.
- A significant number of improvements related to mouse and joystick support have been made.
- Missing DOS commands have been implemented: FOR, MOVE, TREE, SETVER, and VOL.
- Improved integration with file systems. Support has been added for all DOS file and directory attributes, which are stored in standard attributes and xattr, similar to Wine.
- Issues with FPU emulation on non-x86 systems have been resolved.
Source: opennet.ru
