Feature request: first class DOS prompt

[adriangligor]

A few small features would improve the DOS prompt considerably:

• make the settings persistent (like mounted drives, CPU settings, etc) and load them when the DOS prompt is started
• ideally all the settings that cannot be set by GUI, like sound card interrupt settings, commands to auto-execute, etc (essentially Dosbox' conf file) would also be persisted so the advanced user can change them with an editor
• in the general preferences, add an option "Start DOS prompt" to "When Boxer starts"

The background of this feature request is this: I already have a folder representing my last DOS computer's hard disk. All the games and other software are installed and configured to this computer's hardware. I alternately use Bochs, VMWare and Dosbox on this folder. Boxer's DOS prompt is really nice, but I would need to change some additional settings and I would like not to set everything up every time I launch it. Thanks!

[alinebee]

Apologies for the slow followup, I was off on a two-week trip until now.

These are all solid suggestions for the DOS prompt and I'll see about working them into the next release. Most of these I'd contemplated before, but had shied away from them out of fear of breaking some existing use case; but existing use cases are so far and few between in the DOS prompt's current state that I can't see any reason not to now.

The configuration file in which the DOS prompt's settings would be stored would be equivalent to the "DOSBox Preferences.conf" file that appears in every gamebox, and would probably be saved as "~/Library/Preferences/Boxer DOS Prompt Settings.conf".

One issue of note when persisting CPU settings is that Boxer's "Use optimized emulation" checkbox toggle would need to accept a third intermediate state for 'auto' (which is actually Boxer's default). Currently the checkbox only has two states, which are equivalent to core=normal and core=dynamic.