> Mind you there are countless DOSBox forks out there and the vanilla original one is probably the least interesting one.

What do you want to be "interesting" about dosbox?

Last time i checked (and DOSBox hasn't made an official release since then) the vanilla DOSBox isn't able to run the game i made for an MS-DOS game jam a few years ago[0] because it doesn't implement RDTSC properly (that the game uses for timing). All currently developed DOSBox forks work properly.

Also the forks add some additional niceties, e.g. DOSBox Staging has some very nice CRT filters that basically make games look almost like the real thing (i have some actual CRTs to compare). DOSBox-X has a GUI to setup options while the emulator is running which is very convenient.

[0] https://bad-sector.itch.io/post-apocalyptic-petra

Read what the others offer

GUI config, load games from zip and image files, controller support, save states, various sound, graphics, and network enhancements etc.

There is more to this than simply being a DOS emulator.

> What do you want to be "interesting" about dosbox?

Quality of life improvements? Expanded (experimental) hardware support?

The Slirp backend for the NE2000 networking driver is the big one for me.