Forgive my noobian tendencies...

I am under the impression there's no vanilla DOSBOX function out of the box anyway to do save states like in SNES or MAME emulators.

Looking a little into things I found I need a modded version or maybe a pcustom GUI frontend.

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What is my best option either way (preferably GUI if major scripts or BAT files are needed).

P.S. Something well documented that even a pleb like me could follow.

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Mostly want for playing Kings Quest 5 and Count Down again.
I'm too busy for dead ends, glitches and bad choices these days.

I don't see how save states will protect you from the dead ends in KQ5. It already had a save feature. Unless you mean some sort of automated script that would continuously save states every couple minutes or something, but I doubt something like that would exist for dosbox.

you should use this version of dosbox:
http://ykhwong.x-y.net/

it should work (I tried it with Disney Aladdin... On windows I used the last version, on a mac I had to use an older version).

The default version of dosbox does not support save state

I believe the Daum build is considered deprecated though, if it works for you - great, otherwise, there's a newer build with savestates:
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=53116

You can set the hotkeys in the keyboard conf window (ctrl+F1)

Actually the SVN Daum build has savestates and they work fine.

Yes this work fine with save states, playing Terminator 2029.