It might be nice, but DOSBox is already open-source. Your idea would have the advantages of making it easier to create addons to DOSBox and (perhaps more relevant) to make it possible to enhance or customize DOSBox without rebuilding it from the source code. I'm not sure how technically feasible it would be, though, as a lot of that stuff would probably have to hook pretty deeply into DOSBox.

Would a plugin system make it easier to keep DOSBox purely cross platform, but allow plugins that might be platform specific?

That is true...

Like the hidden file attributes Qbix posted in my Global Conquest thread. The game doesn't work in multiplayer because it needs to detect a hidden file attribute and then not find the file when doing a normal directory lookup.

QBix said it's not possible because there wasn't a unified way to do this that is cross-platform.

But if there was a filesystem plugin model, there could be a win32 and linux based plugins that allow hidden attributes on files!

😀:)

Just for reference, Qbix did say that it was possible to do hidden files using DOSBox's disk image support.

Sorry, I was referencing his reply to the hidden flag when I asked abotu future plans to support one, which he said:

well futher then on the imgdrive.
no. No simple cross platform solution.

Which gave me the imipression of, no 😀

Well but this would mean that the working of a game under dosbox
depends on the host OS/architecture.

Would it be possible for DosBox to fake the hidden attribute on a mounted drive using "mount"?

Ex: User would have to run attrib +h on the file which would only have effect under DosBox and not on the host operating system?

Yes, i think so. But in most cases the user doesn't know that
something misbehaves because an attribute is *missing*
(the opposite is much easier to detect, like savegames can't
be written because the readonly flag is ON).