DOSBox ECE - TTLG Forums

Shadowcat on 30/8/2022 at 09:14

The "Enhanced Community Edition" of DOSBox -- ECE for short.

(https://yesterplay.net/dosboxece/)

Quote:

DOSBox is an emulator for old PCs running MS-DOS, focused on running classic PC games. Though it's under constant development, new versions are only officially released from time to time, with many updates inbetween only coming out as changes to the source code on SourceForge.

Here you can find compiled binaries of the original source, as well as an enhanced build and its source code, both created regularly soon after a new version is released on SourceForge. The enhanced build contains numerous patches with improvements that have been created by various users in the DOSBox forums on vogons.org. Because of that it's called "Enhanced Community Edition", ECE for short. The VOGONS community also is the place to go when you're looking for news, help or if you have a problem with or a question about DOSBox.

ECE, currently available for Windows and Linux, is maintained by YesterPlay and currently differs from normal DOSBox in the following features:

Emulation of a 3Dfx Voodoo card via internal (software or OpenGL) wrapper
Improved emulation of OPL3 (a FM sound synthesis chip from Yamaha)
Improved balance and authenticity in FM sound playback
Improved PC speaker sound emulation
Emulation of the Roland MT-32 Midi synthesizer
Integration of Fluidsynth (a software midi synthesizer with soundfont support)
Support for up to 10 joystick axes and 2 D-pads (allowing 2 complete Xbox360 compatible controllers to be used)
Mouse buttons can be mapped to keyboard keys or controller buttons
Support for up to 384 MB RAM, required for running Windows 9x in DOSBox ECE
4MB video memory, reducing sprite flickering in games with the Build engine ("Duke Nukem 3D", "Blood", etc.)
Support for MSF timestamps in CUE files, MP3, FLAC, WAV and OPUS files are supported as cd audio replacement

ZylonBane on 1/9/2022 at 14:51

Umm... DOSBox is free open source software, so isn't every version a "community edition"?

Renzatic on 1/9/2022 at 21:47

Yeah, but calling it a community edition sounds a lot better than DOSBOX SOURCE FORK v3.78.

WingedKagouti on 2/9/2022 at 05:20

Giving a fork a more descriptive name helps direct people towards it compared to other forks.

Calling it "Community Edition" makes the implication that it's the version most people want (whether true or not) as well as being the most properly maintained and stable (again whether true or not). Adding "Enhanced" on top of that is an extra declaration of superiority.

It might be a great version of DOSBox, but the naming feels a bit presumptuous.

Shadowcat on 3/9/2022 at 02:03

If there are some other significant with-patches-included versions of DOSBox available, let me know and I'll turn this into a more general "Alternative DOSBox builds" thread.

My impression was that this "ECE" version was the go-to build of DOSBox for people wanting to make use of features which were fairly stable but hadn't yet made it into an official release (it was the rather active thread in the DOSBox Development forum at (https://www.vogons.org/viewforum.php?f=32) which made me aware of it) -- but I'm not up with the play, and I may have misconstrued the situation.