Basically, there are two main options the community prefers: (a) using the specialized emulator “Zeta” with the original executable or (b) using the modern sourceport ClassicZoo.
Zeta is preferred over DOSBox for some reasons I don’t quite remember (better input handling, CPU speed scaling?). Zeta is also the thing people use for in-browser play (on the museum and itch) — ideally it’d support touch controls for mobile users, but that’s still not the case.
ClassicZoo is a native sourceport that I tend to prefer over the original. It has a good amount of options, a better file browser (you can move between directories!), and even the ability to download worlds directly from the museum (I haven’t really used that lol). There might be some jank getting it to run for the first time, and I’ve run into a couple weird bugs with it over the years, but I think it’s perfectly fine (don’t tell that to the author).
As for substantially different forks, the only one in active use these days is called Weave, and games that use it always have the correct version bundled with them.
would love seeing that community taking his name off it. we did it to notch for being a creep why not the child predator CEO guy. it’s not like he does anything for the community
tl;dr for anyone curious: it is still a lot of work to set up, requiring several mods and config tweaks; also still crashes randomly sometimes. but you can play at 60 FPS and the shader compilation stutters are not nearly as obnoxious now that there is caching.
