exo: I've gotten over 8,000 games running in dosbox. Many of our fixes have been inherited by gog.
I have to rely on 13 different dosbox builds because of all the issues inherent to vanilla 0.74r3.
Anyone who thinks vanilla dosbox is sufficient has only relied on it for major commercial releases.
Anyone who wonders why staging got banned hasn't spent any time on vogons. I once asked about getting a game running and was immediately accused of breaking "rule zero" (no piracy). I took a picture of my disc and posted it and told the guy he needed to check himself, and instead of the mods agreeing with me, they told me I was out of line for defending myself.
The second the dirty word "GitHub" was mentioned at vogons, the devs got defensive.
To be completely fair, the mouthpiece for staging at the time (_dreamer) was being obnoxious as well. He came into my discord and didn't do the project any favors. But now, several years later, staging has added several features that are key to the eXoDOS project.
Everything from quality of life changes (such as being able to mount wild card images and have it detect and load them in the proper order) to including the recently developed ReelMagic emulation allowing us to properly emulate MPEG versions of games like Return to Zork and American Laser games.
None of which vanilla can do right now.
Then there is the fact that vanilla dosbox and svn dosbox still have tons of issues with win3x games that daum solved a decade ago. So far, only staging has shown any commitment to trying to bring those changes forward, while dealing with all of the potential regressions.
Even with staging out of the picture, if you think X and SVN are the only two build that matter, you haven't spent time setting up proper networking, extended sound cards (fluidsynth & general midi), etc. Hell, last time I tried to get networking running in X I couldn't get the networking to even initialize. When I reached out to the author, he looked and found her had it disabled because, according to him, "no one ever tested it". Not exactly confidence inspiring.
So if you "just want to play forking DOS games", maybe you should drop the tribalism crap and take time to understand why different builds are beneficial for different games. And then you will eventually realize how limited and archaic the vanilla version your precious vogons devs are peddling.
Well, yours is a sliiiiiiighly edge-case, when it comes to DOSBox builds, considering that you are amassing thousands (tens of thousands?) of games in a single package - many of which 90% of DOS users never saw or knew anything about :-P
So said, you can do whatever you want with DOSBox code, it's open source after all. What you should not do, is exactly what the dosbox staging team did: declaring that they were creating the fucking "future of emulation" and that they wanted to do the thing the way they thought was the best for the project.
It's the same bullshit I've read for years about retroarch/libretro, and I'm not interested in the slightest. It's not tribalism, I don't think the DOSBox authors need anyone's help here or elsewhere. It's just that I hate bullshit, there is too much of it in the AFK world already. And I saw dosbox staging be born out of bullshit and propaganda, so I avoided considering (and I will continue to do so in the future) the project altogether.
