breshar wrote on 2024-02-13, 18:41:

I use D-Fend Reloaded 1.4.4 for quite a while now. I've added about 400+ entries, also making separate entries for modded games like Commander Keen or Doom.

This version of D-Fend Reloaded is outdated, and ScummVM probably changed the file format, so D-Fend Reloaded doesn't know how to read it.

Hi,
just was strolling through the forum yesterday to see if there are any new interesting posts and stumbled across the D-fend Reloaded thread and saw that people complain that Dosbox-X is not really supported in D-fend Reloaded. I am using Dfend Reloaded since a lot of years. Unfortunately I started with my games database (way more than 1000 games and software until now) before development of D-fend Reloaded ended, so I am now stuck with it. On the other hand it worked flawlessly until now, even with Dosbox-X. Just had to add a new Dosbox installation under Program options, point to the Dosbox-X folder and rename the exe from dosbox-x.exe to dosbox.exe. Any additional settings (like for example for MT32, used soundfonts or printing) can then be added in the "Custom settings" field under "Dosbox settings", though I have never tried Voodoo support until now. So I never had the need to even touch the dosbox-x.conf file. Just lately I had a problem with the Z drive path (Z:\;Z:\SYSTEM;Z:\BIN;Z:\DOS;Z:\4DOS;Z:\DEBUG;Z:\TEXTUTIL). Seems with newer versions of Dosbox-X the path needs to be added by hand in the DOS environment settings of D-fend Reloaded.
Maybe someone finds this helpful.
Ohrensessel

IIGS_User wrote on 2024-02-13, 19:05:

breshar wrote on 2024-02-13, 18:41:

I use D-Fend Reloaded 1.4.4 for quite a while now. I've added about 400+ entries, also making separate entries for modded games like Commander Keen or Doom.

This version of D-Fend Reloaded is outdated, and ScummVM probably changed the file format, so D-Fend Reloaded doesn't know how to read it.

I was thinking of renaming Dosbox-x to dosbox and having it for defend reloaded too today. Some other ideas today were add support for qbasic and/or basic-a wizards... basic-a was provided in a botched MIT license release by Microsoft releasing msdos 4.01. For 2026-1 January so far Dosbox-X has many new features... You may have to create a new config file for it, backing up your old one first.

Hi, I was looking at this frontend and think gee this would be good in Windows Millennium so I don't have to use the command line in DosbBox all the time.
There's nothing about system requirements for it.
Its funny how AI says run millennium in DosBox-X but doesn't talk about DosBox in Millennium itself. (I see no benefit except a toy)
DosBox is useful in Millennium as it has no dos mode. Even though its not supported.

I tried the dosbox-x method of renaming the .exe to dosbox.exe and the .conf to dosbox.conf. I got window mode to work, but fullscreen does not work well at all. Dosbox-x uses a different method of scaling. It does not stretch. When I go to fullscreen, it turns to just garbled lines and colors. Dosbox staging does not work at all.

Estel Randir wrote on 2026-09-26, 04:31:

I tried the dosbox-x method of renaming the .exe to dosbox.exe and the .conf to dosbox.conf. I got window mode to work, but fullscreen does not work well at all. Dosbox-x uses a different method of scaling. It does not stretch. When I go to fullscreen, it turns to just garbled lines and colors. Dosbox staging does not work at all.

Hi, I maintain a fork of D-Fend Reloaded called DFendX. It has first level support for Staging (and X/Pure). I would be interested to see if it solves any of your problems.

https://github.com/cyberfox1/dfendx/releases/tag/2.6.2

kolderman wrote on 2026-09-27, 05:03:

Estel Randir wrote on 2026-09-26, 04:31:

I tried the dosbox-x method of renaming the .exe to dosbox.exe and the .conf to dosbox.conf. I got window mode to work, but fullscreen does not work well at all. Dosbox-x uses a different method of scaling. It does not stretch. When I go to fullscreen, it turns to just garbled lines and colors. Dosbox staging does not work at all.

Hi, I maintain a fork of D-Fend Reloaded called DFendX. It has first level support for Staging (and X/Pure). I would be interested to see if it solves any of your problems.

https://github.com/cyberfox1/dfendx/releases/tag/2.6.2

I appreciate your response. How far along are you on dosbox-x support? I have tried 3 different forks of dosbox and it is by far the best.

I am using dosbox game launcher right now. It is pretty good, but it lacks the extra user friendly perks that defend reloaded has. Defend reloaded has superior pathing support (you can have spaces in your game paths), sound support is much easier to configure (one-click midi driver detection), the entire game configurations are stored in each game profile (not just the differences between the game and the default.conf), etc. Filter support was a bit bad though. Some of the filters were darker than they were supposed to be (I.E. tvx2, tvx3).

When I have time, I will give it a try. One thing I hope you change. The dosbox.conf files in defend reloaded are .prof files and have a different format than the dosbox.conf files. This causes a lot of issues when trying to convert .prof to .conf and then import into another front end. Even though you can convert using Defend Reloaded, it does not work very well.

Estel Randir wrote on 2026-09-30, 22:59:

I appreciate your response. How far along are you on dosbox-x support? I have tried 3 different forks of dosbox and it is by far […]
Show full quote

kolderman wrote on 2026-09-27, 05:03:

Estel Randir wrote on 2026-09-26, 04:31:

I tried the dosbox-x method of renaming the .exe to dosbox.exe and the .conf to dosbox.conf. I got window mode to work, but fullscreen does not work well at all. Dosbox-x uses a different method of scaling. It does not stretch. When I go to fullscreen, it turns to just garbled lines and colors. Dosbox staging does not work at all.

Hi, I maintain a fork of D-Fend Reloaded called DFendX. It has first level support for Staging (and X/Pure). I would be interested to see if it solves any of your problems.

https://github.com/cyberfox1/dfendx/releases/tag/2.6.2

I appreciate your response. How far along are you on dosbox-x support? I have tried 3 different forks of dosbox and it is by far the best.

I am using dosbox game launcher right now. It is pretty good, but it lacks the extra user friendly perks that defend reloaded has. Defend reloaded has superior pathing support (you can have spaces in your game paths), sound support is much easier to configure (one-click midi driver detection), the entire game configurations are stored in each game profile (not just the differences between the game and the default.conf), etc. Filter support was a bit bad though. Some of the filters were darker than they were supposed to be (I.E. tvx2, tvx3).

When I have time, I will give it a try. One thing I hope you change. The dosbox.conf files in defend reloaded are .prof files and have a different format than the dosbox.conf files. This causes a lot of issues when trying to convert .prof to .conf and then import into another front end. Even though you can convert using Defend Reloaded, it does not work very well.

Hi, thanks for the reply.

DFendX has full support for DOSBox-X for the existing options exposed in D-Fend Reloaded, plus many more (and more to come). There may be less commonly used options in DBX not exposed yet, but if you come across one you would really like to see exposed, please raise it as an issue.

As for converting prof files to conf files - the existing dosbox conf generator does just that (thats how it launches dosbox in the first place), so I am curious as to what is not working so well when you generate a conf from a prof. Are there attributes missing?

[/quote]
Hi, thanks for the reply.

DFendX has full support for DOSBox-X for the existing options exposed in D-Fend Reloaded, plus many more (and more to come). There may be less commonly used options in DBX not exposed yet, but if you come across one you would really like to see exposed, please raise it as an issue.

As for converting prof files to conf files - the existing dosbox conf generator does just that (thats how it launches dosbox in the first place), so I am curious as to what is not working so well when you generate a conf from a prof. Are there attributes missing?
[/quote]

I cannot give you an exact set of settings. But when I tried to import the converted profile from defend reloaded into dosbox game launcher It was not a smooth import. I had to manually adjust a lot of things. Maybe it's the way DBGL is setup with fields not pulling the correct information, I really cannot say. Although your interest is not in making the .prof or .conf files compatible with competing front ends, it is worth making sure the data is converted into the correct format. The profiles are the lifeblood of dosbox.

One thing I have noticed. As much as I have nostalgia for Defend Reloaded. When I used DBGL, some of the standard scalers that are common to dosbox simply work better. I loaded dosbox 0.74-3 into both DBGL & Defend Reloaded. If, for example, you run the tv2x or tv3x scalers in Defend Reloaded - they are a bit too dark and unclear vs if you run them on DBGL. This is using the exact same version of dosbox, but a different launcher. I could not tell you why. It looks a lot better in DGBL than Defend Reloaded. There maybe more examples.

Also, one of the problems with newer front ends, is that they are not pulling up the shaders that are present in the newer dosbox forks subdirectories. Maybe that is because these forks are evolving so much? There are a ton of shaders over on https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-shaders/tree/master. I think these are the same ones also https://github.com/tyrells/dosbox-svn-shaders … tree/master/crt.

If you can get full support for the innate scalers & full shader support going for Dosbox-x & Dosbox Staging, with Defend Reloaded features, I think you will be the top front end.

Estel Randir wrote on 2026-10-01, 05:56:

If you can get full support for the innate scalers & full shader support going for Dosbox-x & Dosbox Staging, with Defend Reloaded features, I think you will be the top front end.

Interestingly, getting shaders working for DOSBox-X and Staging was the very first thing I did for DFendX, and was actually the motivation for starting the project in the first place. Would love to hear your feedback how it works for you!

[/quote]
Interestingly, getting shaders working for DOSBox-X and Staging was the very first thing I did for DFendX, and was actually the motivation for starting the project in the first place. Would love to hear your feedback how it works for you!
[/quote]

I downloaded it, configured options, added a few games. Works just like Defend Reloaded did, so no surprises. Game pathing, Midi setup, etc all good and easier than other modern managers. Dosbox-x seems to be working great. Shaders work . I even added my own tweaked shader to dosbox-x directory and the drop down in the profile window picked it up as an option - that is really good. It is so much better to have them as a dropdown and not have to navigate to a path. I really don't care for the other dosbox versions. So I am good. All my hard drives (lap;top) are super fast M.2 drives. And for some reason there is a long pause in both Defend Reloaded & DefendX when opening a profile. Is there a way to optimize this? Also, I am super happy the font customization on all but the profile screens is still a feature. I run 4k monitors now.

Features / suggestions:

1) I know you can customize panel colors (to an extent) but Is it too much trouble to add customizable themes? Maybe the ability to choose a custom color in the existing system. I actually use Win 11 dark mode on many applications and it works nicely.
2) Resizable profile windows
3) Along with 2) maybe the ability to customize the font in the profile window? Windows 10 / 11 do a horrible job. No matter what you do many of the "sub windows" like the profile window are scaled to some preset scale by Windows. The text in the profile window is getting hard to read.
4) Someone already said icon view. ScummVM did this a few years ago. Seems to be all the rage with things like Launcbox, Duckstation, etc. There are a lot of nice fanmade icon covers for dos games now.
5) It is not my thing, but maybe a mobygames info lookup?

Good job making the old tride and true Defend work with modern dosbox versions. Keep up the good work.

Estel Randir wrote on Today, 04:23:

Interestingly, getting shaders working for DOSBox-X and Staging was the very first thing I did for DFendX, and was actually the motivation for starting the project in the first place. Would love to hear your feedback how it works for you!
[/quote]

I downloaded it, configured options, added a few games. Works just like Defend Reloaded did, so no surprises. Game pathing, Midi setup, etc all good and easier than other modern managers. Dosbox-x seems to be working great. Shaders work . I even added my own tweaked shader to dosbox-x directory and the drop down in the profile window picked it up as an option - that is really good. It is so much better to have them as a dropdown and not have to navigate to a path. I really don't care for the other dosbox versions. So I am good. All my hard drives (lap;top) are super fast M.2 drives. And for some reason there is a long pause in both Defend Reloaded & DefendX when opening a profile. Is there a way to optimize this? Also, I am super happy the font customization on all but the profile screens is still a feature. I run 4k monitors now.

Features / suggestions:

1) I know you can customize panel colors (to an extent) but Is it too much trouble to add customizable themes? Maybe the ability to choose a custom color in the existing system. I actually use Win 11 dark mode on many applications and it works nicely.
2) Resizable profile windows
3) Along with 2) maybe the ability to customize the font in the profile window? Windows 10 / 11 do a horrible job. No matter what you do many of the "sub windows" like the profile window are scaled to some preset scale by Windows. The text in the profile window is getting hard to read.
4) Someone already said icon view. ScummVM did this a few years ago. Seems to be all the rage with things like Launcbox, Duckstation, etc. There are a lot of nice fanmade icon covers for dos games now.
5) It is not my thing, but maybe a mobygames info lookup?

Good job making the old tride and true Defend work with modern dosbox versions. Keep up the good work.
[/quote]

Thanks for the feedback, and glad it worked well for you for the most part. Font/themes are not something I have explored yet, and the general performance of opening profiles is something I have looked at, but is largely a carry over from the way Reloaded was designed. It would require a major rewrite of the conf handling which I may get to some day, but probably not soon. Mobygames used to be a data-source, but as they are paywalled now, I can't even test against their API without subscribing, so it got replaced with TheGamesDB.

However, there is one thing you should be able to try today - the Icon View. That is already there, under View, along with Screenshots. I think they give you the view you are looking for.

And it's good that the shader combos picked up your custom shader - I spent a bit of time matching the way dosbox X/staging look up shaders from various paths so the combo would contain all possible shaders dosbox would see, so its nice to hear it worked!

Cheers!