DOSBox Pure promises to be "A new way to experience the past"

Indie developer Bernhard Schelling has announced DOSBox Pure, a forthcoming version of the open-source DOS emulator designed to be compatible with emulator frontend RetroArch, which has struggled with it in the past. DOSBox Pure will include new features like the ability to launch games directly from zip files and mount CD images from them, as well as full controller support, with mouse, keyboard, and joystick mapping. It'll have a cheat menu and the ability to search for new cheats in a game's code, and support for save states as demonstrated by a clip of some classic reloading until you hit an unlikely shot in Jagged Alliance.

There's also MIDI support with SoundFonts, an on-screen keyboard you can bring up, a startup menu with an austostart option, a database with info on 20 years' worth of games, and probably more features that I didn't notice because I got caught up in a wave of nostalgia seeing games like Descent, Command & Conquer, and Syndicate again. And is that developer Crack dot Com's only game, the sidescroller Abuse?

The announcement video ends by noting that DOSBox pure will be "Coming in winter 2020 (I hope)". Can't wait.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.