Bug#973822: ITP: dosbox-staging -- DOSBox Staging is a full x86 CPU emulator (independent of host architecture), capable of running DOS programs that require real or protected mode.

[David Heidelberg]

Hello Philipp,

I've been watching DOSBox development for long time and it seems their 
progress is very slow, with limited number of SVN commits, not yet 
merged SDL 2 support and no releases it doesn't seems it will thrive in 
future.

As I understood DOSBox Staging was originally meant as a incubator for 
new patches, which are not yet merged into DOSBox (similar to Wine and 
Wine Staging) and needs to be tested, but original DOSBox authors 
didn't agreed to cooperate with this project.

I believe this project - written with modern standards in mind, having 
CI and very friendly and supportive developers is currently in much 
better state than old DOSBox.

Comparsion of technical features and abilities can be found directly 
here:
https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging
Best regards
David Heidelberg

On Thu, Nov 5, 2020 at 19:37, Philipp Kern <pk...@debian.org> wrote:
On 05.11.20 17:41, David Heidelberg wrote:
 Package: wnpp
 Severity: wishlist
 Owner: David Heidelberg <da...@ixit.cz>
 X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-de...@lists.debian.org

 * Package name    : dosbox-staging
   Version         : 0.76
   Upstream Author : The DOSBox Staging Team
 * URL             : https://dosbox-staging.github.io/
 * License         : GPL-2.0-or-later
   Programming Lang: C, C++
   Description     : DOSBox Staging is a full x86 CPU emulator 
(independent of host architecture), capable of running DOS programs 
that require real or protected mode.


 DOSBox Staging is a full x86 CPU emulator (independent of host
 architecture), capable of running DOS programs that require real or
 protected mode.
 It features:
 * A built-in DOS-like console
 * Emulation of several PC variants: IBM PC, IBM PCjr, Tandy 1000),
   and CPUs (286, 386, 486, and Pentium I)
 * Graphics chipsets: Hercules, CGA, EGA, VGA, and SVGA
 * Audio solutions: PC Speaker, Tandy Sound System, Disney Sound 
Source,
   Sound Blaster series, and Gravis UltraSound
 * CDROM and CD Digital Audio with audio optionally encoded as FLAC,
   Opus, OGG/Vorbis, MP3 or WAV
 * Joystick emulation working with modern game controllers
 * Serial port emulation including IPX over UDP and Telnet over 
TCP/IP
 * Hardware-accelerated video output including integer 
(pixel-perfect)
   scaling, sharp-bilinear scaling, OpenGL shaders, and more

 DOSBox Staging is highly configurable and sufficiently-optimized to 
run
 any DOS game on a modern computer.

 Q: why is this package useful/relevant?
 A: Sucessor of DOSBox, which is already inside Debian

Why do we need both rather than upgrading dosbox? Is this package
supposed to take over the existing binary package eventually?

Kind regards
Philipp Kern