try autolock is false in the dosbox options

Thanks for the reply, but I'm confused about the recommendation. Autolock refers to mouse/cursor emulation, so I'm confused how it affects opening in background.

But I checked. I already had autolock=false in my headless conf file which I specify in the command args. I also tried it in the GUI app by editing ~/Library/Preferences/DOSBox 0.74 Preferences. It had no effect on stealing focus there either.

btw. if you are using SVN of Dosbox, then the config should be ~/Library/Preferences/DOSBox SVN Preferences.

Also, I dimly remember that there is a patch or someone was working on making Dosbox work better in a headless case. But no idea where that is or what it was about exactly. sorry.

Thanks Dominus. Turns out that DOSBox SVN Preferences does have autolock=false. Not sure if you changed the default or if I modified it at some point.

I am assuming that the 0.74-1 app bundle I'm testing is your SVN build.

If you happen to remember or run across the headless patch/build, I'd love to see it. I've searched several times but all the threads I've found point to using AutoHotkey on Windows to auto hide the DOSBox window (and disabling the console window on that platform).

I did something similar with AppleScript on the Mac before I started using the SDL_VIDEODRIVER=dummy env var. Both work but they're not very seamless as DOSBox still kicks the user out of a different virtual desktop and/or pushes the current active app to the background when DOSBox launches from the batch testing script.

Actually the 0.74-1 app bundle is a recompile I did for the 0.74 release with development sources of SDL 1.2x and two or three minor backports (things that got fixed in Dosbox for OS X) of DOSBox SVN to make 0.74 compatible with current OS X versions.

My SVN build has SVN in the app bundle name, I think and available from my signature.