DOSBox Staging

DOSBox Staging is a modern continuation of DOSBox with advanced features and current development practices.

It is a (mostly) drop-in replacement for older DOSBox versions—your existing configurations will continue to work, and you will have access to many advanced features.

For a detailed description of the project's scope please refer to the About page on our website.

Donations

If you enjoy using DOSBox Staging, please consider a donation to the project.

If you want to help but can't afford a donation, check out the Get involved page of our website for other ways to contribute.

Project website

https://www.dosbox-staging.org/

First-time users and people migrating from other DOSBox variants should start by reading the Getting started guide.

Build status

Stable release builds

Regular users should use our stable release builds available on our project website:

• Windows
• macOS
• Linux

Development builds

Development builds are automatically created on every commit merged to the main branch. You need to be logged in to GitHub to download the development builds.

Development builds

Key features for developers

Feature	Status
Version control	Git
Language	C++23
Logging	Loguru for C++<sup>3</sup>
Build system	CMake + Ninja or Visual Studio 2022
Dependency manager	vcpkg
CI	Yes
Static analysis	Yes<sup>1,2</sup>
Dynamic analysis	Yes
clang-format	Yes
Development builds	Yes
Unit tests	Yes<sup>4</sup>

Source code analysis tools

• PVS-Studio — C++ static analyser
• Pylint — Python static analyser
• markdownlint — style checker and linter for Markdown
• ShellCheck — shell script analysis tool

Dependencies

DOSBox Staging has the following library dependencies:

Dependency	Provides feature	vcpkg package name	vcpkg version	Optional?
Asio	Network API for emulated serial and IPX	asio	1.32.0	no :red_circle:
FluidSynth	General MIDI playback	fluidsynth	2.5.7	no :red_circle:
GoogleTest	Unit testing (development)	gtest	1.18.0	yes :green_circle:
IIR	Audio filtering	iir1	1.10.0	no :red_circle:
libmt32emu	Roland MT-32 and CM-32L emulation	libmt32emu	2.8.3	yes :green_circle:
libpng	PNG encoding of screen captures	libpng	1.6.58	no :red_circle:
libslirp	General purpose TCP-IP emulator	libslirp	4.9.1	yes :green_circle:
Opus File	CD Audio playback for Opus-encoded audio tracks	opusfile	0.12+20221121#1	no :red_circle:
SDL 3	OS-agnostic API for video, audio, and eventing	sdl3	3.4.16#1	no :red_circle:
SDL_image 3	Image decoding for many popular formats	sdl3-image	3.4.4#1	no :red_circle:
SpeexDSP	Audio resampling	speexdsp	1.2.1#1	no :red_circle:
zlib-ng	ZMBV video capture	zlib-ng	2.3.3	yes¹ :green_circle:

¹ You can use plain old zlib instead.

Dynamically loaded dependencies

Slirp is built separately as a dynamic library (via vcpkg) and is loaded on-demand at runtime if available. Please refer to the dosbox-staging-ext project for further details. To check the version of this dependency included in our stable and dev build packages, check out the comments of the releases packages of the dosbox-staging-ext project.

For information on the optional Nuked SC-55 CLAP audio plugin, check out the plugin's GitHub repository (note Nuked SC-55 CLAP is not a DOSBox Staging project).

Build instructions

Please refer to the platform specific build instructions:

• Windows
• macOS
• Linux

For building versions prior to 0.83.0 (e.g. when bisecting), see the legacy Meson build guide.

Website & documentation

Please refer to the documentation guide before making changes to the website or the documentation.

Imported branches, community patches, old forks

Upstream commits are imported to this repo in a timely manner, see branch svn/trunk.

• svn/* - branches from SVN
• forks/* - code for various abandoned DOSBox forks
• vogons/* - community patches posted on the Vogons forum

Git tags matching pattern svn/* are pointing to the commits referenced by SVN "tag" paths at the time of creation.

Additionally, we attach some optional metadata to the commits in the form of Git notes. To fetch them, run:

git fetch origin "refs/notes/*:refs/notes/*"