Well there are already some frontends like D-Fend that a lot of people unfamiliar with DOS have had a great amount of success with.

The only alternative to a frontend that I think would be useful is to have a menu that can be used to change DOSBox settings while it is running. This has also been discussed and for now is only a dream, as it will be quite complicated to implement.

There are some proof-of-concept type thingies (I wrote one as a simple batch file), but as far as I understand, our esteemed dosbox fathers like the idea in general, but are totally undecided as to where to go from here (and underpowered - too much else to do).

One important question would be: Is it sufficient to have a command to type which then starts such a menu? If yes, we're not far away - the config menu mentioned above is 95% complete. If you expect a mouse-clickable interface, it's more difficult. That probably takes some effort.

Another thing is......how often would this be used?

We already have frontends and DosBox has been designed with frontends in mind. Wouldn't any built-in interface therefore be inferior to external frontends? Also instead of focusing on DosBox's main goal of compatibility we would also have to devote time to making sure the built-in interface had all of the latest features and that they worked......

Personally I think it would be nice if a built-in GUI were included but not until a later date when there isn't much else to worry about......there is still a LOT of compatibility work left to be done and working on a GUI has nothing to do with that. There's nothing stopping a person from playing around with the DosBox source tho and creating their own, then showing it to the DosBox devs tho....

I think a GUI would be immensely useful if it were able to be accessed while a game is running. Being able to load, edit and save config files, change mounts, and open new disk images in the middle of a game would make things a lot more user-friendly. In addition, there wouldn't be as much need for hotkeys.

Note that my idea of a GUI is probably different from most other people's, as I'm proposing that it should be purely an alternative to hotkeys as a way of tweaking DOSBox's behavior while it's running. For user-friendly game configuration and launching, I think frontends are probably the best way to go due to DOSBox's design (i.e. usng text-based configuration files and whatnot).

I do agree that it's a low-priority luxury, but it's something good to think about and discuss.