DOSBox v0.73 Released

After nearly a two-year wait since the previous version, the DOSBox team has released a new v0.73 version of the popular emulation software. The notable changes:

– Add two new opl2+opl3 emulators. (better speed, different implementation approach)
– Improved DRO recording/better file structure.
– Add EGA emulation.
– Add special vga machine mode. Supports more of the exotic tricks like changing the palette during screen updates, 9×16 fonts etc.
– Added special machine modes for the following svga cards:
  – S3
  – Paradise
  – Tseng
– Fix problems with the vga split line feature.
– Improve vesa emulation.
– Add optional selection of old vesa mode for games that don’t work with certain vesa features.
– Improve video BIOS emulation to behave more like a real bios.
– Fixes for emulated 4bpp graphics modes.
– Fixes to paging system.
– Various fixes and improvements for the recompiling core.
– Add arm backend for the recompiling core.
– Add some mscdex quirks when dealing with files that are exactly 8.3 long.
– Small fixes to batch file handling.
– Small fixes to the XMS memory handling.
– Various fixes for aligned memory on hosts that want it.
– Various improvements to the mouse.
– Fixes and small speed ups to the debugger.
– Fix and improve lot’s of compilation problems. (curses detection, GCC 3.4 and GCC 4.X fixes)
– Added some basic auto keyboard layout handling. (windows only currently)
– Add basic support for evdev keyboard driver.
– Various fixes to the timer. (improve mode 2 timer changes, implement mode 1, improve gate2 handling)
– Add audio extraction and mci audio support. Should enable CDROM audio for Vista and adds volume control.
– Improve the directory cache speed a lot, especially with mounting slow media like network paths.
– Various fixes to the create temporary file call.
– Don’t keep batchfiles open during execution. Allows rewriting of the active batchfile. (menu programs use this trick sometimes)
– Fix problems with filenames with 2 extensions.
– Add some more lowlevel dos tables.
– Fixes to hercules emulation.
– Fix flag handling for special case of ROR.
– Make the batchfile handling in regard to IF more flexible.
– Fixes to scrolling/panning feature.
– Add prefetch queue emulation.
– Make the emulated cpu type selectable. This is mainly the identification commands and the way paging works.
– Some special EMS functionality added. (OS handles, zero-page handling)
– Improve support for EMS when booting a different OS.
– Improve cdrom speed detection by games.
– Improve stability of cycle guessing code, when there is background activity.
– Fix various mscdex and cdrom detection schemes.
– Added Coremidi support on Mac OS X.
– Improve support for DOS devices when used to detect the existance of directories in various ways.
– Add IRQ 2 emulation on VRET. (ega only)
– Added video parameter table and video state functionality.
– Increase default freespace to 250 MB.
– Some fixes to the fat filesystem handling for disk images.
– Some soundblaster fixes and command additions.
– Fix mixer 16bit direct transfers on bigendian hosts.