Yes, i think a "dumb user" behaviour is missing, like .conf file versioning
that prevents loading old configurations.

I obviously have my dosbox.conf set up as I want it, with rates, paths to GUS, autoexec commands, etc., etc., and practically every time an official or CVS version comes out, there's something new added to the file.

It sounds like your using just one dosbox.conf? Your not using a seperate dosbox.conf for each game?

So your saying DosBox should just automagically overwrite the settings you manually entered with it's defaults? Does that sound like a good idea?

New sections, new shaders, new options... and then I have to copy and paste this changes into my dosbox.conf file, line by line, word by word, which is so tedious and annoying, especially since the files is set up messily and the order of some parts is random ([printer] in the middle of video settings?).

Why don't you just comment out a seperate section in your dosbox.conf with all of the changes that you make to your dosbox.conf each time. Then next time you generate a new dosbox.conf just look back at your commented section of your sections and then update your dosbox.conf

Dosbox should simply do what Mame, Gens and pretty much every emulator does: open the config file on startup *and* if there are any sections or lines missing, add them, filling them with default options.

“The” config file again. a lot of people (damn openoffice splitting up the “a” from “lot” grrr), use seperate .conf's for their games. It appears that you are using just one.

What you should be doing is creating seperate .conf's for each game with only the lines that you need to change in each .conf (dosbox will automagically use default values so they don't need to be in your seperate .conf's).

IMO, it's a bad idea to have a program modify the .conf you spent a lot of time modifying.

I could just run it then and let it write what it, instead of for instance copying the whole new [glide] section and wondering where to put it, as I've just done...

Don't blame the DosBox devs for new sections that they have nothing to do with because as of the latest CVS there is still no [glide] section in DosBox. Also, it doesn't matter where you put the [xxx] sections. They can go anywhere.

(And just in case - no, I don't consider "let it create a new config file and edit it from the scratch" to be any "advice" - as I said, I have the config edited and customized heavily)

Then you should. Create a seperate .conf file with ONLY your customizations and the use DosBox defaults and/or create a special section in your .conf file with commented out lines that describe your customizations.

HektorSkeltor wrote:

Dosbox should simply do what Mame, Gens and pretty much every emulator does: open the config file on startup *and* if there are any sections or lines missing, add them, filling them with default options.

Which is exactly what DOSbox does, and have done for a very long time.

So stop whining, create a minimal, game-specific config-file for each game, with the settings that you want to change from the built-in defaults, and create a short-cut that launches DOSBox with that minimal config file.

start dosbox using your old config file
and create a new one using the config -writeconf command
All missing sections and headers are added!

HektorSkeltor, this fix will help you. It refreshes your configuration file.
If you don't have dosbox.conf, dosbox will automaically create the configuration file. Uploaded on sourceforge.

1--- ../predosbox/src/gui/sdlmain.cpp	Thu May 18 00:05:16 2006
2+++ ./src/gui/sdlmain.cpp	Thu May 18 00:05:22 2006
3@@ -1720,6 +1720,10 @@
4 		} else {
5 			config_file="dosbox.conf";
6 		}
7+			FILE * f;
8+			f=fopen(config_file.c_str(),"wb+");
9+			fclose(f);
10+			control->PrintConfig(config_file.c_str());
11 		/* Parse the config file
12 		 * try open config file in $HOME if can't open dosbox.conf or specified file
13 		 */

I have always used a single .conf file because I like to run DOSBox and navigate to games from the emulated DOS prompt just like I would on a real DOS machine. If I have trouble with a particular game, I'll tweak my dosbox.conf to work with that game (I typically only play 1 or 2 games during a session, so it's not usually necessary to do a large amount of tweaking).

When a new version comes out, I use Qbix's method of regenerating the dosbox.conf (usually to a separate filename so I can make sure nothing got clobbered).