DFendX 2.5.0 - "Unexpectedly Nuked"

This week was supposed to be a quiet week, with only a few small patches landing in today's release (originally planned as 2.4.1). However, this week also happened to coincide with the stable release of DOSBox Staging 0.83.0. As such, a number of new features are now mainline, and it's only right that DFendX supports them out of the box. This includes a new "soundcanvas" option for MIDI sound (based on Nuked-SC55), CRT color emulation settings, hard/floppy disk noise, and more mouse emulation settings. So much for a quiet week...

Let's go through the new features as reflected in DFendX.

Sound Canvas SC-55 MIDI Option
A new MIDI device option is now available for DOSBox Staging, "soundcanvas", which equates to the emulation of a Roland SC-55 (as implemented by Nuked-SC55). An SC-55 ROM directory is required to be set (as Staging does not ship such ROMs), and additional options include the specific model and a filter option.

Image Quality Form
DOSBox Staging 0.83 brought a number of image quality related settings, including CRT color adjustment, FMV deinterlacer and additional image adjustment controls. As the number of new options greatly exceeded the available form space on the already cramped Graphics frame in DFendX, a whole new Image Quality form has been added to contain these new options.

Mouse Options
A number of new mouse options are now available too on the Mouse form, for selecting the kind of mouse and some additional mouse behavior controls.

Drive Speed/Noise
For some added retro-realism, DOSBox Staging now supports simulated noise of hard disks and floppy drives, as well as related speed options. New controls for these have been added to some space made available on the Drives form after the excessively large drive list box was shrunk.

Program Update Checks
In the first release of DFendX, program updates had been disabled, as they were deeply tied to the old D-Fend Reloaded SourceForge page and untangling was going to take time. However, I am happy to announce that the program update checks have been rewritten to look at GitHub Releases, and both manual and scheduled checks should result in update alerts once a new release occurs in future. Automatically downloading/installing the new release package is no longer provided, and is not a planned feature for DFendX.

Game Title Metadata
Up until now, the profile name was considered the game title for most purposes - no separate metadata field existed for the game title separate to the profile name. While this worked well most of the time, with DFendX now supporting multiple DOSBoxes there is a greater need to be able to have different profiles for the same game. This requires different profile names to reflect whatever difference might exist between them (different DOSBox kinds, different sound/graphics options, etc.). However, that breaks functions that require the exact game title to function - e.g. eXoDOS media lookup or opening game website links. So an additional metadata field has now been added - Title. It is set automatically when importing from eXoDOS or using the Wizard to create profiles, and can also be updated by the online metadata downloader.

Wrapping up
Beyond the above, there was the usual assortment of fixes and performance improvements, hopefully bringing increased stability and QoL for end users.

As always, check out the latest release on GitHub, and raise any issues you may find!