> there are DOSBox forks, most popular one would be DOSBox-X

Straight from the article:

> there are actively developed alternatives like DOSBox-X

> Mind you there are countless DOSBox forks out there and the vanilla original one is probably the least interesting one.

What do you want to be "interesting" about dosbox?

But I wonder if Heroic can install HoMM2 on a Mac if no Mac binary is available on GOG.

Heroic Launcher is awesome on the Steam Deck

I do the opposite and put all games together, with DOS BAT-files to launch the games. I boot up my virtual dream DOS machine by just starting DOSBox-X and then I launch the games the way they are meant to be launched, from the DOS COMMAND.COM command-line. And as I mentioned in another comment, all of that is in one big DOS git repo.

Nice thing with DOSBox-X is there is a built-in command to set config parameters, so for games that require special settings or to slow down etc that can be set up from its launcher BAT file. All games share the same dosbox config file with default settings.

Boxer was wonderful in its day, I think it also became the basis of the official GOG Mac DOS game releases for a while too:

> https://www.gog.com/forum/general_archive/mac_dos_game_editi...

I've hoped for years someone would pickup the source and get it going again, it's essentially abandonware right now, no changes in nine years. The website is like a time machine back to the peak skeuomorphic mac app era. It still has the nicest UX of any of the DosBox variants I've tried. In this era of agentic rewrites, modernizing this app is probably the cheapest it has ever been too...

> http://boxerapp.com/

> https://github.com/alinebee/Boxer

Dosbox-X has network support via NE2000 drivers.

I never had any issues using WINE to install GOG games, but maybe running WINE on a Mac is not as easy now as it was back when I did that on a x86 Mac?

I always run the GOG installer in WINE and then copy the game into my git repo for DOS stuff, make sure the game works, git commit it, and then I know it will always just work and I will not have to think about that again (plus I can version manage all settings and save-games for all the games and also sync between my different machines without relying on any cloud service).

Hmm i guess this would require figuring out how to extract game data from an .exe installer GOG distributes. I guess AI would figure it out in like 3 minutes ;) I’ll check later.

> Retro gaming

What they say is "we will keep a subset of Rosetta functionality aimed at supporting older unmaintained gaming titles, that rely on Intel-based frameworks" which sounds like OS X games. But even if it is all-inclusive "retro" games, that means the 1,000s of contemporary games runnable via Crossover through Steam for Windows are being shut out.

They relented under pressure to continue allowing Linux virtual machines, so hopefully they continue to revisit this decision.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/abou...

That's an "I'll believe it when I see it working on my machine" matter.

As my sibling post says, it's more likely to work only for some older mac os native games.

Dosbox has its emulator to run DOS, but afaik dosbox binary that starts up dosbox on Mac uses Rosetta on M-series Macs, and without Rosetta it simply won’t start and emulate DOS.

If they choose to discontinue it, it would be nice to have them opensource it so that the community could have a go at maintaining it tbh. Surely that's better than letting it rot (both rosetta and the old software that it runs).

I imagine that the area it takes up on the chip is non-trivial and so it'd cost them a ton to continue to have it.