dosbox-staging, a 'soft' forking of DOSBox to work on advanced features has a first release

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.