The main problem I've had with DOSBox is that starting up a game was difficult for someone not used to DOS. People are not born with the knowledge of "type DIR to see directory contents, type DIR \p to keep directory contents from scrolling off screen before you have a chance to see them all" and stuff like that. Sure, people who are playing DOS games are probably already kind of old or good with computers, but I think it could have another option where it makes it easier to do. My suggestion is to program it so that if you run a DOS-game .exe with DOSbox it simply runs it. That is, in Windows, if you drag the .exe file onto DOSbox's exe, then the game starts up. Or if you right-click on a game's exe and say "Run with DOSBox" or "Open with..." and then choose DosBox from the menu, then it will open with it. The DOSbox program can be made to understand that it needs to look for the other files that the .exe is in the directory of (that is, it automatically, behind the scenes, goes through the steps of seeing which directory it's in, then which files it needs, just as though you typed cd \games\game.exe). This way you wouldn't really need a frontend. But if you must have a frontend, just make it easy to double click on the name like running any other emulator. People approach this like another game emulator, so they expect to open a menu and find a ROM in their ROM folder and then it loads it up, or they expect it to be like Mame32 and have a list. Or you could have a DOS-y version of a "front-end." I mean, when I run MAME from cmd.exe it lists the games in my ROMs folder. You could have it so that when you run DOSBox a message pops up that says "Type 'games' to see a listing of games in your DOS-games directory" and "If you have not set up your DOS-box games directory, type the following commands, or put your DOS game folders and files into the prebuilt DOSBox directory called 'games'." And so the user would just type "games" at the DOSBox command line and he'd see a listing of what he's got, then he'd type the name. Also it could have a built-in list of DOSgames -- yes I know there was a lot, but MAME has this feature and there was a lot of arcade games -- where if the user types "quest for glory 4" instead of "qfg4" it would give a suggestion for what to type or automatically load it up based on the closest match.
