Ok, its a riddle, but not a very difficult one. It has to do with the topic of this subforum... and we all use it, except for those who use a custom build, obviously. In fact, the one thing Id be looking for would be if the developers would surprise us on the 12th of May.
Even the numbers would match: they could just call it ".75"

it's either DOSBox or DOSBox
🤣

DOSBox.exe 3.727.360 12.05.2010 11:55 -a--

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d6yBHDvKUw 😁

Well, go ahead and bundle it with HalfLife 3 !

... ahh!!

now I get it. I´m waiting for both, and it seems to take the same time. So thats the reason! The bundle is reality!

The DOSBox team has intensified its relationship with Steam, and Gabe Newell himself has decided to make HL3 a DOS game, running on the ubiquitous and versatile DOSBOX 0.75 !!

Now we just have to hold on a liiiiiiitttle while longer while they work out a few remaining bugs

Just in case anybody missed it: tomorrow it will be five years without a new release of DOSBox... sigh.
Or maybe not, we can always hope

In honor of the five year anniversary, I would present my own Windows DOSBox compilation. In terms of features and current official SVN code updates is as close to an official 0.75 as it gets today. It has screenshot support, which I gather that the basic SVN compilations do not. It also has a few compatibility fixes that have not made it into the official SVN. It does not have debugger support, but neither does the official 0.74 install package. Nor does it have support for additional features like Voodoo emulation and ISA PNP support found in the DOSBox Daum and DOSBox-X unofficial forks.

Thank you o Great Hierophant! And wow, I didnt think something like this would happen, but... there it is.

Great, thanks mate! I'm one of the Neanderthals who probably won't need any of the features in here, as I tend to use 0.74 or whatever version comes bundled with the GOG games, but this is still great to have, and might make me (and my fellow unadventurous types) experiment with the new features.

Edit: I've just tried it, and it seems fine, but are there instructions anywhere to explain the changes and new features, please? And if this version includes snapshot load and save, then what are the keys?

Snapshot load/save is not in SVN and I doubt it is covered by compatibility patches 😉

Edit: just in case screenshot != snapshot. If you meant screenshot then the readme should cover you...

Kerr Avon wrote:

Edit: I've just tried it, and it seems fine, but are there instructions anywhere to explain the changes and new features, please? And if this version includes snapshot load and save, then what are the keys?

The changes from 0.74 can be found here :
http://source.dosbox.com/dosboxsvn.txt

I do not believe there are any new features that require configuration or require new keys to implement the functions, but I defer to the above-document. There are oodles and boodles of bug fixes but also support for things like CGA composite color graphics in a 320x200 resolution, DOSBox-command line interpreter support for DOS 1.x floppy images, support for High-Sierra format CD-ROM images. No extra features or configuration options over and above what is included in DOSBox 0.74 is provided, so no save states, no 3dfx emulation, etc. My compatibility fixes relate generally to issues with sound devices.

Thank you very much, again, for your work and for the changelog!

I´d really like to see this version made public as an offical release.

Some of the bug fixes in here are quite significant, especially the aspect correction, which has been improved greatly from 0.74. You must understand that DOS games were meant to be played on a 4:3 monitor, not a 16:9 monitor as is the standard today.

Without "aspect true" in the config (or as a command within the DOSBox prompt), the old games simply dont look the way they were meant to be. Unfortunately, on DOSBox 0.74 aspect correction, although present, is very much broken, especially for text mode, Windows 3.x games etc.

This is just at first glance, there are other fixes in here for very old DOS version games, for specific titles and CD-Rom. Really makes you wonder why, in 5 years, the esteemed developers - whom we love, of course - couldn´t get around to creating an offical release. But maybe they´re just aiming for the 10th anniversary 😀

That kind of talk doesn't help...

jk3one wrote:

Some of the bug fixes in here are quite significant, especially the aspect correction, which has been improved greatly from 0.74. You must understand that DOS games were meant to be played on a 4:3 monitor, not a 16:9 monitor as is the standard today.

Aspect correction is needed because pixels at some modes like 320x200 and in some text ones are not square.

Really makes you wonder why, in 5 years, the esteemed developers - whom we love, of course - couldn´t get around to creating an offical release.

People just use fresh "unofficial" releases if have problems in 0.74. If to publish SVN as official it will not become better.

Tertz wrote:

People just use fresh "unofficial" releases if have problems in 0.74. If to publish SVN as official it will not become better.

That's not true at all; probably more than 90% of people using it are doing it through Steam of GoG and never touching config files, let alone hunting down alternate versions. They don't get any of the benefits of improvements.

Even for those who do, a major sticking point is that all official documentation on the web is based on 0.74, and for anything newer, you have to grovel the forums to even find out what capabilities it has, when each is different. -X has a well-documented default config file, unlike the rest, but not everything works right and much of the new stuff doesn't work at all on the SVN and Daum builds. Daum uses the -X UI and defaults but doesn't support most of its new features, so anyone picking D3D or xBRZ from the menu is just going to crash the app. (And bizarrely, defaults to D3D even though it doesn't support it, so it really defaults to surface.) Longer delays between stable builds makes integration work for patches that much more difficult, as well.

Keeping improvements locked up in the unofficial channel for longer than necessary just fragments the user base, and it keeps the dull but necessary work of finishing a proper release (particularly documentation) from ever getting done. Unfortunately, inertia is what it is, and someone else will probably have to take over the work of creating a stable release if it's ever going to happen.

foxyshadis wrote:

and for anything newer, you have to grovel the forums to even find out what capabilities it has, when each is different.

Most of said functionality is generally independent of the config file, and the stuff that isn't probably isn't of much concern to most users.

Daum uses the -X UI

If you're referring to the menus, those are completely separate from DOSBox-X, last time I checked. I'm not sure where those came from, exactly; I think ykhwong might have made it himself.

Most Steam and GOG users wouldn't bother with any more than what ships with their game and in most cases don't need to replace it.

Besides, it does not take much to become aware of ykhwong's build and where to find it. No groveling required.