@pbblair
I am going to attempt to go back to your original post.
If I were you I'd switch on the TANDY mode. It looks like it supports the TANDY 16 color graphics.
VGA supports standard CGA graphics modes, because it is REALLY backwards compatible by nature. The TSR's will not work in VGA mode, because after you enable VGA, DOSBOX is only going to show CGA as those four colors. In CGA mode however, it buffers the video and waits to see if the user is mimicking the actions of using a NTSC video monitor.
What I would do is use the DOS menu outside of DOSBOX, and create batch files which invoke instances of DOSBOX with the various configurations. You need to use the menu outside of DOSBOX, because it is issuing a command to Windows to start the executables.
You can take an entire CONF file and stuff it into the command line after DOSBOX.EXE, figuratively speaking, you just rewrite the same switches like DOSBOX expects, all in the DOSBOX manual.
Those TSR programs don't do much, except enable DOSBOX in an assistive way to catch the attempt to turn on CGA COMPOSITE mode, and trigger it properly. The EXE one, that I made, just triggers the color burst, which will take some games and make them start to bleed color, if in the right CGA mode in the first place. The COM TSR, that the other thread postee created (quite skillfully I might add), watches constantly for a certain request of screen mode, and eliminates the accidental junk that stops the COMPOSITE CGA to not work for various reasons.
They play on DOSBOX's triggers to start COMPOSITE emulation, and don't fully emulate COMPOSITE CGA, not even a bit. They help it act more like an actual CGA card would act.
To re-write an entire CGA COMPOSITE emulation TSR, just for DOS, would take a wizard in assembly language for one, and lots of time to debug, and someone with the passion and desire to see it even attempted, plus the coding skills.
"there's a special step for Troll's Tale to get the colors to look right" -
What do you mean by this? Are you using one of the TSR programs to get the colors right?
Also, I can rewrite my TSR so it does it's thing without needing to press ALT-P.
~Kiyote