Playing windowed is a must for me, but man are the borders from the window a total immersion kill for me, is it possible to get Dosbox to run as a full-screened window without borders? If so how?

I'm curious, why is windowed mode a must?

Sucks that this is probably the closest I can get, but thanks for the answer anyway.

Alt-tabbing and performance.

http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Borderless_Fullscreen_Windowed

I'm confused... if the window borders are a total immersion killer, surely seeing your desktop and taskbar is also an immersion killer? Then there's also "full-screened window"... It sounds like your definition of windowed is different from mine. Can you explain what you mean?

Most games take quite a while when tabbing out of fullscreen to get back in. Also quite some may crash or get graphical errors when you do it. Dosbox jumps to windowed mode and changes some aspect ratio settings while doing it if you tab out.

If you use more than 1 screen you also automatically tab out of fullscreen stuff if you klick on something on the second screen.

I use that tool to make many games borderless windowed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oYQZFLBkAg
You should use the hotkey method because with auto mode it often affects other windows if you tab out.

Stable alt-tabbing I can see as being beneficial, though I personally find the times that is needed are few and far between and those rare occasions where I might need it, the Steam overlay works fine (don't hate, I manage all my games through Steam these days, though that isn't an option with DOSBox games).

However, I don't see how this could improve game performance. The performance should take a hit if you run like that, since instead of rendering just the game, your PC will be rendering the desktop as well as the game simultaneously. The wiki link TheJoe posted even says as much. Of course the impact of the performance hit would depend greatly on your hardware and the demands of the game itself.

Actually, it works fine on OpenGL. It doesn't work on DDraw, but it would work on Direct3D if DOSBox supported that. There are versions out there that support Direct3D, but not the 'normal' DOSBox.

I'm bumping this simply because you tell us:

" then set the Windows taskbar to not cover windows"

Which means what...? There is no option for this and if there was, I wouldn't be looking for a solution!

I just don't get it. Other than auto-hide which is a terrible option that always hides the taskbar, I just want DosBox to be "over" the task bar.