Summary After a rather long wait, the DOSBox Staging team is proud to present our new major 0.83.0 release! I think we’ve managed to outdo ourselves again as this has gotten even bigger than our monstrous 0.81.0 release. Instead of coming up with excuses why it took so long, let’s take a look at our new killer features:

• 100% authentic Roland Sound Canvas SC-55 emulation via Nuked-SC55. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve bagged this long-coveted trophy of DOS gaming! I really couldn’t tell the difference between our emulation and the hardware SC-55 unit sitting on my desk during extensive A/B tests!
• Authentic CRT colour emulation to take another big step towards faithfully emulating those miniature particle accelerators, also known as CRT monitors, on our modern flat screens! 😎
• Image adjustment controls to tweak the brightness, contrast, saturation, colour temperature, etc. settings, just like on a real CRT monitor.
• Totally overhauled frame presentation that achieves better out-of-the-box results with proper VRR and vsync support in most circumstances. The new system is much simpler — the old presentation settings seemed to give everyone a headache.
• Wide-gamut monitor support to achieve even better CRT-like results, and playing DOS games with radioactive colours on DCI-P3 displays is just not fun.
• FMV deinterlacer to do those campy full-motion video 90s adventure games justice on modern screens. Yes, you can combine deinterlacing with any shader, including the CRT shaders.
• Checkerboard dedither to remove dithering not just from those old EGA Sierra adventures, but from any DOS game on any graphics adapter (we just had to one-up ScummVM, hadn’t we? ). Again, you can combine dedithering with any shader.
• A comprehensive user manual that goes beyond a reference guide: it covers basic concepts through detailed device configuration, and offers a historical overview of the DOS era for users who didn’t live through it.
• HTTP API to muck around with the emulated memory and DOS internals to write modding and cheat tools as simple single-page web applications. The first one to reimplement Gold Box Companion using this API gets a prize!
• Floppy and CD-ROM automounting to make setting up games even easier.
• Disk noise emulation as there’s something oddly satisfying about listening to HDD and floppy drive chatter while a game loads.
• Improved mouse emulation, including proper 2-button mouse emulation support, and added several game-specific hacks, such as a fix for the jerky/uneven mouse pointer movement issue in Ultima Underworld I & II.
• Clipboard support to allow copy/pasting text between the DOS prompt and the host operating system.
• A large number of DOS command improvements, such as merging the IMGOUNT and MOUNT commands, a new MAKEIMG command for creating disk images, a new supercharged MEM command, and many other small enhancements.
• DOSBox Staging now uses a gettext compatible *.po translation file format. This makes translation work a lot easier, and allows the use of specialised translation-aiding software, such as the well-known Poedit.
• Several locale handling improvements, in particular, making the locale autodetection work more reliably with less surprises. Read on to learn more!