Hi everyone,

I've always liked Boxer for macOS—specifically how it treated DOS games as beautiful, self-contained "gameboxes" on a digital shelf, completely abstracting away the tedious text-file configuration.

So I rolled up my sleeves with Claude to bring that experience to Windows, built from scratch for modern systems. I'm excited to share EmuDOS, a dedicated, frontend designed specifically around the DOSBox Pure core.

EmuDOS is a native libretro host built on .NET 10 (WPF). It talks directly to dosbox_pure_libretro, handling the rendering, input, and audio loops directly.

Key Features :

The Bookshelf & Smart Import: Drag-and-drop a folder, .zip, or CD image. It instantly parses it, generates a self-contained "gamebox" folder, and displays it as 2D/3D box art on a shelf.

No Manual Config (Just-Works Settings): It features a curated catalog seeded from eXoDOS data to apply known-good DOSBox settings automatically upon import (fully overridable per game).

Native Roland MT-32 Integration: Includes an embedded MT-32 synth shim (built from Munt). Just drag your ROM files into the app, and you get MT-32 playback complete with a simulated, working on-screen dot-matrix LCD.

Rich Media & Scraping: Features automated art downloading via ScreenScraper and SteamGridDB, manual downloading from the Internet Archive, and animated game-card video snaps powered by bundled LibVLC.

The Best of DOSBox Pure: Full support for live save states, gameplay recording (via FFmpeg), mouse locking, and multi-disc swapping (with automated Windows 9x installation/booting support).

Portable & Clean Architecture: The central database is just a rebuildable index over your gamebox folders. If you move a gamebox folder, your saves, configuration, and art move with it.

Built-in recording, screenshots, and a cheat engine.

How to use it:

Launch EmuDOS.exe. On first launch, head to Preferences → Downloads to grab the DOSBox Pure core natively.

Drag a game in and play. That's it! I'm trying to support as many extension and image types as possible with the goal that this should be extremely easy to use.

GitHub Repository: https://github.com/codingncaffeine/EmuDOS

💬 Feedback Welcome!

I’m actively working on this (i'm adding features and fixing things almost every day) and would love to get the VOGONS community's take on it. I'm looking for feedback on edge-case game compatibility, UI usability, and feature requests.

I'll be monitoring this thread to answer any technical questions about the architecture or implementation!