First let me say I'm a total newb with DosBox so hopefully I can make this make some sense for you guys. Anyway I was wondering about the GoG installed DosBox version that comes with some games and the latest DosBox version found on the DosBox site, for example Masters of Magic and MOO2 install DosBox v0.73, and if I'm not mistaken the latest version of DosBox is v0.74, is it recommended to manually install or update to the latest version for these old games even though GoG's own installer set everything up for an outdated version? And if so how do people go about this process of updating DosBox without breaking stuff? Again reminder that I'm a total newb with DosBox.

Been playing MOO2 from GOG for quite a while, and I played other games not from GOG on the newest DosBox version, and I saw no different, so I don't think it matters :)

Welcome to the forums

I have no clue what im doing with Dosbox and all that but I own a fair few games on GoG that use it and I have never had any issue's with just downloading and installing,

To be honest with you I wouldnt worry about version numbers etc unless in the unlikely event something goes wrong with it, In which case the GoG support team will be more than happy to assist. (I got a support respond yeasterday a sunday after launching the ticket late friday evening so they must be quiet :-P)

Im sure other members can likely answer you more fully and more soberly but thats up to them

Some games run better on older version of DosBox, just leave it to GOG folks.

Don't worry about manually doing anything with DosBox. It's best to just install the version of dosbox in each game installer into that game's folder. Since DosBox only takes up a couple MB, you don't lose any significant hard drive space.

It certainly wouldn't hurt to just have one install of DosBox and point all your games to that version. But, to save a little bit of time and clicking I recommend just using the DosBox that comes with the game installer. That way you avoid any potential 'compatibility' or 'configuration' issues, even though changes to recent DosBox versions should be minimal.

According to a staff response at http://www.gog.com/wishlist/site/update_dosbox_and_scummvm_games_to_latest_versions 'many of the fixes we've deployed are version-specific', so upgrading might or might not break stuff, depending on the game.

Ah didn't know about some games being version specific, I was just wondering before because usually the case with newer version is general bug fixes and optimization tweaks to the software, and I didn't want to miss out on those even if the game currently appears to run fine. It's just a habit of mine of looking for newer versions to update to of old software from many years of keeping computer software updated, good practice n all.

If I want to try some GOG game (which uses older DOSBox version) with a newer DOSBox version that I have installed on my system, I just copy the game files from the GOG game folder to the mounted DOSBox0.74 directory, launch the DOSBox0.74, and run the game from there as I would run any DOS game.

Well, that works for non-CD games. There may be CD-based GOG DOS games where this is more complicated, e.g. if they mount some CD image in dosbox.conf file.

Hmmm, there was some straightforward way to replace the DOSBox version in a GOG installation with a newer version too, as I did that for e.g. Shattered Steel. I don't recall exactly what I did, maybe I just copied the last lines from the GOG dosbox conf file, and otherwise replaced anything DOSBox related inside the GOG installation from the DOSBox0.74 installation.

But mostly it doesn't matter, just use the version GOG provides.