Oneday.

blacksheep wrote:

it would be pretty cool to be able to easily run a game through File>Open, or optionally by dragging it from the file manager to the DosBox window.

You can set a DOSBox shortcut on your desktop and drop a game's EXE on it to mount the game's folder and start the game (at least in Windows). Keep in mind that it won't work if the game needs additional mountings/configurations over those in your dosbox.conf, but for non CD games this often works. The same limitations would be true if drag and drop worked within the DOSBox window, too.

Xmas is a bit too short away...
Dosbox is a project on sourceforge. The project page offers a tracker for bugs, feature requests and patches... The last one is where your contribution would count the most....

Both would be excellent features.

Both are really quite complicated and very detailed work when you take into account the (very) wide portability of DosBox.

Specifically, a menuing system requires either a non cumbersome cross platform widget and menu abstraction (because File->Open needs a dialog box or there's not much point to the menu eh?) or the bare bones work needed to create the same behavior in DosBox. These exist other than the "non cumbersome" part. QT, WxWidgets, etc allow SOME cross platform ability (although how much you can write once run any is the subject of considerable debate) but both carry fairly expensive dependencies, have lots of memory burden, and add code bases that are quite literally larger than Dosbox itself.

What you call session support is more commonly referred to as "save states". You can do a search on the forums to find some background on that that whole can of worms =). Some preliminary work was done by a contributor, so it might be sufficient for your needs. It's really quite complicated to get functioning properly, with save commits to disk.

-Frob