for .72 the file is called
~/.dosboxrc
for 0.73:
~/.dosbox/dosbox-0.73.conf

Sveet, that's perfect. Many thanks.

Although from a system administration perspective it would be nice to set a global configuration file which could be modified by settings in a local configuration file in the user's HOME directory on multi-user systems.

From a packaging point of view, it would be nice for a packager of a distribution to be able to supply default dosbox settings for their particular linux distribution or flavor. However system compliant packages can only install into global system wide directories.

I seem to recall sending you a patch to support this, but you did not know how to query the system's global configuration directory using the gnu autoconf tools (nor did I, and trying to learn autoconf is about as plesant as the morning after drinking three pan-galactic gargle blasters.) However I have picked up some autoconf skillz over the years and can take another look if you think it would be something you would apply.

i see currently no use to distribute a system wide dosbox.conf

$ mv /bin/dosbox /bin/real-dosbox
$ printf '#!/bin/sh\nexec /bin/real-dosbox -conf /etc/dosbox.conf "$@"\n' > /bin/dosbox
$ chmod 755 /bin/dosbox