The following reads more caustic than intended but keeping things short.

Type and range checking are very easy to do, DOSBox already does both when reading values from the conf file.

There are INI parsers as well, INI being so simple, it's a not notable issue. Doesn't need something like XSLT to translate into human readable form because it already is.

Need to use an XML editor to "guarantee" correctness at edit, checking prior to running not an advantage with DOSBox, it's not a slow loading bloatware app like a web browser, ini format is so easy it's a non issue, it's hard screw up even for newbs, and if by chance one does, again, very quickly rectified.