We all know and love DOSBox.
But it has been a while since a new version was released. I once tried a modified one which would also emulate CGA composite mode.

Now with Windows 11 I face the problem that after running a game in Full Screen the start menu won't open anymore. (That was not a problem with Windows 10). Already with Windows 10 it would resize all Windows that shared the same location than the non-fullscreen DosBox and the sound in some games sometimes has some cracks in it which sucks when the music is played as Wave and not Adlib or General Midi (Turrican 2 VGA version to name one. It plays the old Amiga music through SB Pro or SB16Emulation).

So I I think it's time to look for an alternative DOSBox version again. I know there are several unofficial versions around with different focuses. Which ones do you recommend?

Get an updated SVN build, or DOSBox-X if you have issues. Or maybe PCem if you want a Windows 9x PC emulator.

Most of all: STOP COMPLAINING about no new versions. Every time someone complains the devs push a new release three months in the future, so it's all your fault :-D

Unfortunately, I don't find that one version of DOSBox is always the "best" it depends a fair bit on the game and also the hardware on the users PC. That being said, I tend to use these 3 most often:

DOSBox Staging: https://dosbox-staging.github.io/
A very well done DOSBox that tends to work excellent on modern PC's. Uses SDL 2 instead of 1.2. Has options for glshaders and built in integer scaling as a couple of high points.

DOSBox ECE: https://yesterplay.net/dosboxece/
Uses the SDL 1.2 DOSBox as a base and has a good number of useful patches built in without going overboard. Includes a few ways to run Glide games as well (Software (not really useable), Built in Openglide, and external wrapper use [nglide,dgvoodoo2, etc]). Can also use glshaders and can do integer scaling if you download the correct glshader.

DOSBox-X: https://dosbox-x.com/
This is the big one. Actually has 2 different .conf files. The basic one, and the advanced that has all the compatibility options. Can even be used to run Windows from it, I understand. Due to that, mounting CD's and such is quite a different process than the other DOSBox builds. On the plus side, has built in VSync and many compatibility options. I found this one very beneficial for running Epic Pinball with smooth gameplay and gravis sound. I generally only use this one when I have issues with the other DOSBox builds. Turrican 2, now there's a game I don't hear about very often! Out of curiosity, have you tried the gravis sound? And for your .conf, have you disabled EMS and set an autoexec path pointing to the CFG directory? Example: set t2dir=c:\CFG

For what it's worth, I do prefer a bit of leading edge so I pick Staging over all the various spinoffs, and think the mainline DOSbox using SVN is just a bit insane.

Alternatively, you could try using the DOSBox core options from Retroarch. From what I read in Libretro's Discord server, Retroarch should be functional in Windows 11.

Have you installed updates? I was getting that problem immediately after I upgraded, but after a couple of weeks and rounds of updates (including new nVidia drivers - only stating as this could have fixed it), the problem of the start menu not working after running a fullscreen game has resolved itself.

DosEmu, old and now unsupported, but works well for my uses, and seems to be a lot more optimised that DosBox...

Even if there's a new version, there's no guarantee that GOG will update all the DOS games in their catelog to the new version, and if they do it'll probably take months because of how lazy they are. Just look at the speed of Galaxy development.

Well, I use the newest nvidia drivers and the original "retail" dosbox.
And the problem happened yesterday. I am wel laware that this is a Win11 bug, but nonetheless it happens when using DOSBox That's fine by me, acutally I am quite sure that they will never do it. I run the installers exactly one time, then I copy the contents to my DOSGames directory.
There is nothing more retro than using norton commander to select and launch your games.

Everyone, thanks everyone for the input. I'll check it out.

Gravis: Not yet.
But I noticed that the sound cracks were my own doing. My sound card was set to 192kHz(=n*48kHz) frequency, while the game was set to 44 kHz. DOSBox didn't handle that very well (also some modern games don't like that, cutscenes are out of sync). I set it now to 176kHz and everything seems fine so far.

EMS was not an issue so far. Back in the days it was a pain to free enough memory to run the game, with DOSBox it's no problem at all.
I created my own batch file to run Turrican 2, since the config file has to be reset every time after playing to a version that does not contain screen refresh rate information. So I created a config with the values for sound and my Speedlink Competition Pro joystick (quite a good remake, but the original is still better and has a cool functionality which I miss) and copy that to the game dir every time.
For one game (Riddle of Master Lu) I had to limit the free space on the hard disc to 1023 or it would not install from CD. I kept the limit, since it has no negative effect.

@echo off
copy cfg\turrican.cfg .\ /y
set t2dir=.
t2.exe