Well, I've been thinking about it and here are possible ways I see:
1) Each game includes bundled pre-configured DOSBox. Good thing for newbies, bad thing for everyone else since every game will have it's own DOSBox and that's generally a bad idea I think.
2) Each game doesn't include DOSBox itself but rather configuration file suited to run the game. User will have to install DOSBox manually though. This way games will not need to contain DOSBox in each installation, good for size, however it will require a little work afterwards, so I don't think it's much better.
3) Again, each game doesn't include DOSBox but will verify if it exists, a user should point installer to DOSBox location and the installer will do the rest and create valid shortcuts and etc. Almost nothing to do for user but still have to download DOSBox manually.
4) Same as above but installer will also be able to download DOSBox itself if there isn't any on user system (or simply if user wants to). Good thing is that it's sort of update system that will things easier for users. A rather complex task but I know NSIS is capable of this and even much more.
NSIS stands for NullSoft Installation System, installer behind WinAMP and many other software. It's very common today for internet distribution because it have smallest overhead (approx. 30kbytes, depends on many factors though), high compression ratio (lzma, good for old games too) and many features yet to be seen in commercial installation software. I've been using it for some time and even had a chance to make use of it in commercial environment (I used to work in game development/publishing and I also did installers for some games). I think it's well suited for the job and would provide users with easy way of installing and running games.
Once generic installer script is made and tested it can be used later for any game, all you'll have to do is to change the name and perhaps add new sections (components) if you want to (or UI art like I did for Albion). Or anything game-specific. In any case people who will want to wrap their games with it will not need to know programming at all. We could even design it to look in the same style as Abandonia website, NSIS is a very flexible installer (also opensource and free for any use).
Why not .bat? Well... It's ugly, you still have to do things yourself and etc. The goal of the installer is provide easy and yet effective way of making game to run in DOSBox. Those who don't want to do anything with installers can unzip it with 7zip and install everything on their own as they like. This way nobody get hurts and both newbies and experts get the same.
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