First post, by MiniMax
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Has the time arrived when DOSBox should ship with a (prefered?) front-end?
A couple of days ago, I made a comment in the DOSBox Game Launcher thread about how impressed I was with DBGL:
wrote:Hi Ronald, I have not been a big fan of DOSBos frontends (well, frontents in general). I am an old, cranky fella that likes the command line, okay? 😀 But I have been watching you! And if I ever is going down the route of frontends, I think DBGL will be my poison. It is open, it is cross-platform, and generally looks good. It is the first frontend that I have seen that is able to import profiles from one of the competitors - nice!
And today, in another thread about adding an auto-mounting feature to DOSBox, we had this exchange:
wrote:It seems to me that we spend a lot of time asking newbies about how they mounted their virtual drives, and suggest adding this and that option.
wrote:But frontends seem to be the more straightforward solution to this, maybe their use should be forced even more at least for first time
users and newbies.
wrote:I agree. The work on frontends lately has been amazing....even tho I don't use them. 😀
So I want to ask if the time has now come to include 1 or 2 frontends in the standard distribution of DOSBox? Or at least give it a more prominent featuring on the DOSBox download page, in the installer, in the ReadMe (as if anyone ever reads that!), on the DOSBox boot screen, or in the Start => Programs shortcuts created by the installer?
2-3 years ago (when 0.59 was all the rage and dobofro was the only frontend) it could be argued that a platform-specific frontend like dobofro was not a good candidate for inclusion in a package that prides itself of being cross-platform. And dobofro was not that great a frontend either..
I don't know how many frontends that is available now. Something like 20 or so according to the DOSBoxWiki. Many of them are Windows, MacOSX or Linux only, but lately 2 new frontends have emerged that are cross-platform.
DOSBoxGui is written in Tcl/Tk and is advertised as "a multi-platform DOSBox frontend".
DBGL is written in Java and also describes itself as "an open-source, multi-platform frontend for DOSBox".
I am unable to determine the opened'ness of DOSBosGui (except that by nature Tcl/Tk scripts are source-code), but DBGL is definitely open-source.
Now exactly how free that makes the code is unclear. There is no GPL license file or similar in the downloads.
Still, is the time - and 1 or 2 frontends - ready for some kind of official endorsment from the DOSBox developers? And distribution managers?
Will it be a good idea to push a partifular frontend?
I think the time is right.
PS: I seem to be in a scribble mode today 😊
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