Reply 1360 of 2410, by Darkstar
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wrote:Best not to comment if you don't have any idea of what you're talking about. Most of those features aren't needed by games or don't work across multiple operating systems or are only needed by a few games and the patch is hacky but because one or two games need it people bitch. If you have a patch for DOSBox that is for gaming then upchannel it to the devs. If it's a fix for compatibility and it doesn't break anything then you'll see it in SVN.
I already guessed my comment would upset the DosBox fanboys 😀
Apparently you are new to (DosBox) development, because what you describe (and what works in most other open source projects) just doesn't work in DosBox. They won't accept bug fixes, as long as these bug fixes can potentially be used to do more than just play games with DosBox. A lot of VGA, EGA and/or CGA related fixes were rejected in the past because "no (known) game uses these features". Which might be true, or it might not be (who can claim to know every game out there that exists?). The fact that they oppose anything that doesn't fit their vision for gaming under the weak excuse of not wanting to be held liable for someone using non-gaming programs in DosBox is the reason development is stalled, but it is also what creates a fertile soil for forks like DosBox-X, which is eventually a good thing.
wrote:If it's a new feature and it's for gaming purposes then you'll eventually see it in a new ver.
Well, the last "new ver." we got from DosBox was v0.74 which was released 7 years ago. 7 years without a release spells pretty much "dead" to me. And if you look at the commits you will see that 90% of them are compile fixes, cleanups, etc. which are mostly one-liners. The last non-trivial commit was in mid January, and the last "feature commit" was so far back that I couldn't even find it within reasonable time.
And again, this is nothing bad, people move on to other projects, develop different interests, etc. so it's a common thing in open source projects. And most of the time, there are other people who continue the development in their own fork. This is how open source works. I would love to see a flurry of new activity in DosBox SVN, but I understand that with their current focus on DOS gaming only, there just isn't much that can be added anymore. DosBox needs new developers with a new focus and a vision that goes beyond DOS gaming, and these developers will continue innovating with new features. I, for one, am really looking forward to this development..