I use Boxer for Mac and that just plain rocks. MT32 works just by dragging and dropping the f iles.

I tried D-fend Reloaded and MT32 was a pain, had to switch to it manually each time I ran a game.

Anything better?

I use DBGL.

Also some suggestions in these threads:

http://www.gog.com/forum/general/best_dosbox_front_end

http://www.gog.com/forum/general/what_is_a_good_dosbox_frontend

How do these Frontends work? I really can't figure them out. I try to set them up and nothing happens.

no frontend is best frontend.

I think you might be right. I looked up conf files and set up shortcuts to run games. Seems easy enough.

DBGL (mentioned above already) is pretty convenient. It's not only a comfortable frontend to manage your games (and their respective DOSBox configurations), but also a database that can download data directly from mobygames (including screenshots).

You need to launch the frontend from its own shortcut; it does not change existing DOSBox shortcuts.

I've got a similar type of set-up, but added the shortcuts to steam to each game.

I actually run the Norton Commander within DOSBox to manipulate my files.

For several years I was using DOSBox raw, that means just editing the .conf files for all my games. It's not quite difficult, but I understand that hand-made is not suitable for everyone.

This year I noticed that there are more recent nightly builds of DOSBox (since the stable version is already quite old) and discovered a special version which adds more features: a menu bar for live settings, loading programs and save current memory states (like every other emulator is able to).
With that you don't need a front-end, the dosbox has its own frontend. Maybe you want to setup a standard dosbox.conf, but that's it. IIRC you can also configure a game's setting and store them as a new .conf file. It's fantastic.

Download the build here: http://ykhwong.x-y.net/
Here's more info about it: http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/SVN_Builds#Enhanced_SVN_builds

That's a very nice find ZivilSword, thanks for sharing! Admittedly i should have guessed that there was something like this around, but never got around to searching for one.

Best DOSBox frontend these days is definitely LaunchBox, it is a very nice and light program that is inspired a lot by Boxer on the Mac.

I've used it for six months now, it is being actively developed, so it isn't feature complete but as a frontend it is pretty awesome (and isn't ugly) :P:P

http://www.launchbox-app.com/

Screenshot: http://i61.tinypic.com/xdulc3.jpg

Note that this frontend doesn't seem to have a DOSBox configuration GUI so for that you'd want to use D-Fend Reloaded and then import the result into LaunchBox.

Yes, LaunchBox assumes that one knows one's way around the text based config file - which is something I'm sure will be remedied in the near future.

I hope that will be in the next major release. Good workaround you point to :)