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In many cases better served by a fork of DOSBox, such as DOSBox-X [0] or DOSBox Staging [1].
The DOSBox development team really likes to take their time, and often rejects outside contributions. They are only interested in running games, so will even reject bug fixes, unless you can show the bug harms some game. They are still on SourceForge and Subversion, which also acts to discourage outside contributors. Overall a rather conservative and risk-averse approach.
The forks are at GitHub, and have GitHub Actions for CI, and more modern build processes/etc. DOSBox-X wants to support running all applications, including new games; DOSBox Staging has more of a games-centric focus, but still is much more open to new and improved features than the original DOSBox is. Both have a much faster development and release cycle, and are much more welcoming to new contributors.
DOS itself may not be a moving target, but there is still a long way to go in supporting corner cases, features of the platform which applications rarely use, etc.
[0] https://dosbox-x.com/ https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x
[1] https://dosbox-staging.github.io/ https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging
It was written in assembly code: https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS/tree/master/v2.0/source
This is a very old version, but I've seen bits and pieces of the last one they shipped and things like command.com and the "kernel" were nearly the same as this, except for maybe some memory management changes. What part did you want to reimplement?
In many cases better served by a fork of DOSBox, such as DOSBox-X [0] or DOSBox Staging [1].
The DOSBox development team really likes to take their time, and often rejects outside contributions. They are only interested in running games, so will even reject bug fixes, unless you can show the bug harms some game. They are still on SourceForge and Subversion, which also acts to discourage outside contributors. Overall a rather conservative and risk-averse approach.
The forks are at GitHub, and have GitHub Actions for CI, and more modern build processes/etc. DOSBox-X wants to support running all applications, including new games; DOSBox Staging has more of a games-centric focus, but still is much more open to new and improved features than the original DOSBox is. Both have a much faster development and release cycle, and are much more welcoming to new contributors.
DOS itself may not be a moving target, but there is still a long way to go in supporting corner cases, features of the platform which applications rarely use, etc.
[0] https://dosbox-x.com/ https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x
[1] https://dosbox-staging.github.io/ https://github.com/dosbox-staging/dosbox-staging
I took the time a few years ago to learn a bit about how to use Autodesk Animator (it was released with a BSD license some ~10 years ago and can be downloaded legally for free these days). Was really impressed with the GUI. Just press a single key to open the menu that begins with that letter, then the first letter of the menu-item you want to use. They managed to use only words that begin with unique letters while still making a lot of sense. Plus some other single-key shortcuts. And many, to me, unusual design choices everywhere, but it all makes sense and is consistent in a way that after a few hours I was not bothered at all by the fact that nothing was like a modern GUI, and there was definitely nothing about using more modern GUI conventions I can think of that would make it more pleasant to work with.
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