When you go to downloads on the official page you can clearly see the frontends, right it could do with some explanation as to what frontends are ("This will help you"), but they are there in plain sight.
IMO the reason why experienced users don't recommend a frontend, is because experienced users don't use them. And when you don't use it you can't recommend it.
And experienced users don't want to use them because for them the frontends slow them down instead of helping them. And this is likely the reason why there won't be an official frontend.
Another reason up to now for not writing long help replies featuring frontends is that you never know how long a frontend will be developed and when you mention a frontend once people will reference it forever (same reason people are still looking for DOSBox version 0.63 instead of just using the newest version). Following your idea that would no longer be problem, though.

And DOSBox is and isn't the saviour of retro gaming at the same time 😀
It is the saviour because it makes playing old DOS games so damn easy.
But it isn't the saviour of retro gaming in regards to making the "scene" bigger than it is. It doesn't need to, especially the "new" gamers are most of the times not interested in the old games anyway and if they are, they are mostly downloading the games and struggle with every aspect of DOS gaming (also the aspect that downloaded games are sometimes very faulty).
I'm very puzzled why you are so afraid of the retro gaming scene going down in numbers. Does that really matter?

I would disagree about the interest, over 150,000 gamers downloaded Daggerfall when it became available - in the first week! From posts on the Bethsoft forums I doubt many ever got the game working because of DOSBox not being a GUI utility. If DOSBox isn't the saviour of retro gaming, then why the 5 million plus downloads?! Surely that's an oxymoron?

If people that know DOSBox are only ever going to recommend DOSBox, as you say, then that is all the more reason for the next version of DOSBox to have a GUI front end. It's 2010 for goodness sake!

As I said in my post, when added up, I am sure there have literally been a million posts in forum like Vogons, with gamers trying to understand DOSBox commands and DOSBox users trying to explain it to them. I have seen threads of 15-20 post just to get one person to run one game using DOSBox, and 95% of the time it's getting them to understand what the DOS style command is and what it does.

If DOSBox stays a DOS front end, I just don't see it having much of a life left. All the people that are happy with DOSBox and know all it's in's and out's have got it already. Unless DOSBox gets a GUI front end, it is reaching saturation point. The man hours given over to explaining the command structure of DOSBox is also breaking down, with more and more DOSBox owners getting frustrated being asked the same questions over and over again, all this will stop new retro gamers coming onboard.

How would you deal with installing DOS games inside Dosbox with a GUI? Every game needs slightly different steps to install.

ripa, the whole point of a front end is you click in one box, and if it doesn't work you click in another. Front Ends also allow for Templates, and once a template or two is made most DOS games need little front-end tweaking. Tabs and mouse clicks can represent every option you have within the DOS Command structure and you would see much quicker resolutions to queries. Instead of 'I can't get sound' and the response being 'go into the conf file and change the sound option to SB16' and the response being 'what's a conf file?' or 'where do I find the conf file', you would have the gamer going to his GUI front ended DOSBox, click on 'Sound' and from the sound options he would choose SB16 and then come back and post 'thanks'.

With regard installing, you just click on the 'Drives' tab - set up the CD-Rom as the letter you want, set up the hard drive as per the folder you want to install to then you set up your sound and graphics etc *maybe using a pre-made template) then you go to the main set up page and 'browse' (in a window) for the install.exe on the CD-Rom. You then click on apply and then you have the game title in the program list. You can right click and click 'Run' or you can just double click. The front-end then opens DOSBox (you previously told the front end where DOSBox is installed, but this wouldn't be needed if DOSBox was part of the GUI!) creates the DOSBox commands for the CD-Rom and the Hard Drive then runs install.exe. You then go through the install,setting sound etc as per how you set the front end (although it's easy to change!) and eventually th install says 'change to c:\Game and run x.exe, so you exit, go to the front end and change the folder from the CD to the Hard drive folder, you make any changes required in th front end to match the install. You apply again. Now you double click on the game title and the game opens in DOSBox with all the options as per your front end and starts. At no point have you had to type a DOS command and you have a working game.

Remember if it was DOSBox with a GUI front end, you could have the info from DOSBox going back tot the front end, so as you set up the sound, etc within the game, so th front end would set those same options. This would allow templates to be made even easier, so that once you have two or three DOS games installed, you would just call up a template, browse to the game and start it. The main thing is all this would be done in a windows environment with no need to learn any of those esoteric DOS commands that so many gamers have a hard time getting their head around.

I would disagree about the interest, over 150,000 gamers downloaded Daggerfall when it became available - in the first week! From posts on the Bethsoft forums I doubt many ever got the game working because of DOSBox not being a GUI utility.

How do you know that these 150000 are new gamers? It could be that many old gamers that just didn't get to play the game up to now. Or people that just can't pass a free download even though they will never play that. Have there been THAT many posts by people not able to read instructions? 150000? 100000? 1000? 500?

If DOSBox isn't the saviour of retro gaming, then why the 5 million plus downloads?! Surely that's an oxymoron?

I explained that, please read again. Also it is surely not a bigger oxymoron than saying

If DOSBox stays a DOS front end, I just don't see it having much of a life left.

in regard to the 5 million plus downloads.

And again, since you seem to have not read what I read about the saviour part of my post, how is that:

If DOSBox stays a DOS front end, I just don't see it having much of a life left. All the people that are happy with DOSBox and know all it's in's and out's have got it already. Unless DOSBox gets a GUI front end, it is reaching saturation point. The man hours given over to explaining the command structure of DOSBox is also breaking down, with more and more DOSBox owners getting frustrated being asked the same questions over and over again, all this will stop new retro gamers coming onboard.

the problem of DOSBox? It's not being sold, the developers do not gain anything from attracting new retro gamers.

And your idea of templates is actually expecting the people who think the least of the frontends to make templates for the frontends... and the way of handling installation of games with frontends, expects people to do too many manual steps. That requires people to read and the main problem people have with DOSBox is that they can't follow instructions. Frontends would only shift the trouble slightly elsewhere, instead of entering the right mount in dosbox, they would have to enter the right mount in the gui.

Currently, based on my experience, for every gamer who gets his head around the DOSBox DOS commands another three give up. If we don't change that, we are going to be the reason for retro PC gaming decline.

Maybe. But that's the nature of DOS and its games.
DOSBox tries to recreate an similar environment.
By the way, games from back then had manuals with installation instructions included (printed or as readme.txt).

Well,to be honest, I didn't expect much support, never got much support when I suggested a front-end in threads either. I sometime have felt like a traitor for even suggesting a front-end!

I don't know if DOSBox programmers come to this forum, but I wrote what I did hoping they read it.

In any event, go to any abandonware site, any retro site and site talking about DOSBox or DOS games and you get tons of 'how does DOSBox work?', and 'could you explain that for a noobe' and replies that borderline on calling the questioner a moron when thy don't get it straight away!

There can still be a DOS version for grognards like you lot, but I am thinking of how to get - and keep - new retro gamers,k like i expect a lot of those Daggerfall downloaders were, wanting to see where Oblivion 'came from'.

DOSBox users have never shown they want anything to do with front-ends and almost sound as they despise them. So I expected the responses I got. I hope the DOSBox makers have a wide, more empathic view to gamers as a whole. I never expected to change DOSBox users as they have never shown any sign of wanting to support front ends, which is why they are relatively unknown to general gamers.

It's of no interest to me personally. I know how to use DOSBox, and I have been using the D.O.G. front end for years. Unlike most posts on threads that are self serving, as in 'how do I get this game working', etc at least I am thinking about PC gamers generally and how to keep gamers playing PC rather than console, and having them understand PC gamings history.

The elitist view of PC gamers have always been a detriment to PC gaming, and I am sure, that if a couple years ago, DOSBox had gone GUI, I believe we would very many more retro PC gamers, a much stronger PC gaming base than we have now and much fewer wasted server space and gamers time in forums like VOGON's, given over to telling new retro gamers for the Nth time how to mount a CD-Rom, etc. This would allow more time for talking about the games. This would benefit everybody.

But I am not going to flog a dead horse. If retro PC gamers want to have their own little club where only they know what they are talking about, and feel superior by talking down to another gamer trying to understand the DOS commands of DOSBox, then so be it. You're cutting off your own nose off to spite your face, but that's your choice. I just believe it's time for DOSBox to move from 1999 to 2009. We talk about dumbed down games and dumbed down gamers, and yet we don't even want to promote a DOSBox with a GUI front end!

Fair enough.

Start coding, post a patch and stop talking that much.

It's not a part of your scope for DOSBox, should suggest to him to fork.

Well,to be honest, I didn't expect much support, never got much support when I suggested a front-end in threads either. I sometime have felt like a traitor for even suggesting a front-end!

There are lots of nice front-ends. The DOSBox website even mentions some of them.
The main 'problem' is that most people are to lazy to read/learn.
They're seeking for quick solutions and give up if it doesn't work for the first time.

UK_John: I wouldn't expect any support to the old games community from people who don't even care to read a few lines of text, so don't worry about it 😀

Dominus wrote:

IMO the reason why experienced users don't recommend a frontend, is because experienced users don't use them. And when you don't use it you can't recommend it.
And experienced users don't want to use them because for them the frontends slow them down instead of helping them. And this is likely the reason why there won't be an official frontend

This is exactly why I didn't mention them in my tutorials. I have been using DosBox for a LONG time now, pretty much form near the time it became viable, and have just never used them. As they didn't exist then, and now I nvr have problems.

After the front ends discussion on my review channel I checked them out and found them to be clunky and imo, far less elegant then using DosBox as, i see it as anyway, intended. Also, ever system is different, each year. These front ends seam to try to have global settings suggested for individual games, that may not work with how you wish to use them, or require a comp that is faster than you have.

Still on the other hand I can see where he is coming from. As I used to use DOS, I understand it... but the modern "hand held" generation would not be able to get there heads into it very easily as they have probably never even seen a command prompt.

From what I can see is that there front ends are there if you look for them, for those that are having trouble. I mean if they can not even be bothered to go to the wiki and see "Frontends - simplifies running and understanding DOSBox." well.. I dunno, mabey that needsto be bigger on the wiki or something?

While the main thing that newbies seem to have trouble with is the mounting, it is more than DOSBox setting that inexperienced users have with running DOS games. Some may struggle with setting game configurations and have forgotten how to navigate in DOS, my own experience is that those that have no memory of DOS (and thus have no idea about DOS) find the graphics of the old classics too primitive to enjoy. No frontend can easily help configure game settings, so it doesn't seem reasonable expect a frontend to cover all of the bases.

A compromise might be to have a minimal GUI, like the menu bar that ykhwong had in his build for just the basics, like mounting. I know that the main problem with implementing ykhwong's menu bar is how to keep it portable. But I would think that it would be easier to port to other platforms than a full blown GUI that covers all aspects of DOSBox settings.

UK_John wrote:

In any event, go to any abandonware site talking about DOSBox or DOS games and you get tons of 'how does DOSBox work?', and 'could you explain that for a noobe' and replies that borderline on calling the questioner a moron when thy don't get it straight away!

This is a very positive thing. A software pirate that don't know how to run the games they illegally downloaded is the best possible software pirate 😁

collector wrote:

my own experience is that those that have no memory of DOS (and thus have no idea about DOS) find the graphics of the old classics too primitive to enjoy.

I am not sure about this low intensity gfx game on these "hand held" devices are totally in vogue... as is retro games witch can run perfectly on them.. With things like scumVM getting ported to these devices and other such ports.

Granted, the graphics would look fine on the small display of a hand held device, I was thinking of modern PCs with their huge monitors. Then again, a GUI on a hand held device may be another kettle of fish. How many hand held platforms has DOSBox been ported to? How many have the guts and storage to handle any of the later DOS games?

I got DOSBox on my black Nokia E52, which got a 600MHz ARM11 CPU, and run UFO: Enemy Unknown on it. But it's slow even though the sound is disabled, although I do find it playable, but only barely. Prince of Persia is fully playable, but TES1: Arena isn't really playable at all.

ScummVM manages to run all the games I tried in a most excellent way, though, although that's not very surprising as the only emulation it's doing is the AdLib stuff.

A big problem for a Dosbox front end is that it has to work well across all the platforms that Dosbox supports currently, or it's a step backwards.

It is *really* hard to build a fully transparent GUI app across a bunch of platforms. Adding something like QT would dramatically increase compile times and memory usage - and Dosbox is quite useful in that it has very little overhead in memory, and so can run on things like cell phones.

There are platform agnostic Dosbox front ends now - DBGL pops to mind - but that for example is based on Java (and tremendously expensive in memory compared to Dosbox). Granted, it has a lot of "extra" functionality beyond just a visual interface, which as a user I am thankful for, but that's really what many people including the OP I believe mean when they say "GUI front end". People don't just want a File/exit menu, they want an install game button. And that's way beyond the scope of just a GUI.

I'm with most of the other posters here - if you really NEED a front end, then you aren't going to be able to handle DOS installs anyway, and you're probably hosed. In that case, you're perfectly happy as a novice user downloading one of the pre-packaged GUI front ends, some of which even allow for the bundling of game installs in downloadable form. All that functionality piled on top of regular Dosbox would be a terrible distraction to the maintainers, make it less portable, and narrow the range of hardware it can run on.

Please note I am not anti-front end. In fact, I use DBGL all the time. I just don't need to - it serves as a convenient and no brainer way to make a menu out of all the DOS games I want to launch, but the first time I install them, you can bet it's plain dosbox and editing the config file.

-Frob

I think that getting a PC game to run is often a game in itself. When you have gotten it to run, you have accomplished something.

Running any game can be condensed into four categories:

1. Set up the hardware environment

2. Install & configure the game

3. Navigate to & run the game

Any DOS game would have instructions detailing how #2 & #3 would be accomplished. DOSBox, being an emulator, is sometimes less than perfect in installing programs.

The basic configuration setting can probably run 90% of games without a problem, assuming the user has a fast enough host system. Mounting a drive should be the only thing that should stump people.

#2 is best served with documentation, assuming the user is taking their game from something intended to be used in DOS. Original versions, not compilations, are the best example here. Install.exe or Setup.exe works in 85% of cases.

#3 can be mastered very easily. The user needs to know how to use the CD and DIR commands, how to change drives, how DOS directories and subdirectories work, and how to execute a program.

Newcomers expect that everything should be handed to them on a silver platter. But that is not how DOS games work, they require some love to work.