I didn’t get you anything for christmas, because I am a heel, but there’s plenty on the way Boxer-wise in the next couple of months and alpha builds continue apace. There’ve been lots of improvements in the recent Boxer 1.0 alphas: most of them tedious behind-the-scenes tinkerings, but happily some new photogenic features to show off too.
Yes, after almost three years Boxer finally has a Preferences panel, making it officially a proper Mac app. Currently this panel only includes graphical preferences, but it will be expanded into a tabbed interface with further options as needs dictate.
My current pride and joy is the egregiously overdesigned Rendering Styles panel. Trimming Boxer's rendering options down to four, this presents them as a framed picture gallery to feed my quixotic obsession with physicality. In future versions these portraits may show a live preview of your current DOS window, but for now the Avatar of the Eight Virtues lends his comely face to them.
I've never liked the default Boxer document icon, which appears when a gamebox has no cover art. Boxer 1.0 now restyles ‘naked’ gameboxes as bootleg game copies instead: either as a CD-ROM jewelcase, 3.5" diskette or 5.25" floppy, depending on the age of the game inside. My humble apologies to Sophia Teutschler, from whose excellent Coversutra app I ripped off the original idea.
At the moment the icon is only displayed in the Dock while Boxer is running a gamebox, but future revisions will apply a bootleg appearance to gameboxes in Finder too, via a Quick Look plugin.
Automatic update notifications return to Boxer 1.0 by way of the excellent Sparkle framework. Boxer now checks for updates daily so you’ll get the freshest alpha builds, and it will painlessly download, replace and restart the app to apply the update. A new alpha build is produced about once a week, and I usually mention it on Twitter also.
Significant fixes to CD-ROM handling: you can now play CD audio and swap game CDs back and forth without DOS losing track of them or OSX complaining that the drive is in use.
More Boxer functionality reimplemented: Boxer 1.0 now autodetects configurations for games and respects drive letters and labels embedded in bundled drive names, the way Boxer 0.8x does.
Fixed a major regression to display performance in Full Screen mode and at large window sizes, so games should run much more smoothly now.
The DOS prompt will no longer display junk like OSX's metadata files or Boxer's gamebox configuration files, so directory listings are a lot cleaner.
Go download the latest alpha and try it out!
That's right boys and girls, the sourcecode for Boxer 1.0 alpha is now available on Bitbucket. There's also a ready-to-roll universal binary too, if you're squeamish about building stuff yourself. Check out the previous blog post for an idea of what's new in Boxer 1.0.
BGHUDAppKitPlugin.ibplugin. This is only needed once, and registers this plugin with Interface Builder so it can compile XIB files that use it.As always, give it a try and tell me what you think in the comments!
After a month of solid work, I'm finally at a point where I can show off some of the new UIs going into Boxer 1.0.
Most of Boxer's juiciest UI features are tucked away in the new tabbed Inspector panel, which can be opened from the Window menu or with CmdI.
The Gamebox tab lets you customise the properties of the gamebox you're running. Besides selecting a gamebox's default program (more on this later), it lets you drag-drop your own cover art to set the gamebox's Finder icon.
This tab will later pick up those nourishing metadata fields people seem to love so much—publisher, year and such—which will be used for Spotlight integration.
What I'm particularly pleased with is that if you drop an opaque image (such as box scans from Mobygames), Boxer will give it a stylised box appearance that looks achingly good in your DOS Games folder:
If you drop in an image that already has transparency, then Boxer will leave it alone and just set it as the gamebox icon—so if you want to roll your own box art, Boxer’s down with that too.
The CPU tab gives you control over emulation speed. At the moment this is pretty barebones, but it will be expanded in future to let you modify other emulation settings.
But! The last thing I want is a baffling wall of sliders and checkboxes. Instead I’d like to try offering flexible presets for the different eras of DOS computing: AT, Tandy, 386, 486, Pentium. These would be presented as a ribbon of stylized computers (a la the Apple Store): choosing one would set the graphics mode and memory settings appropriately, and cap the CPU slider to appropriate minimum and maximum values for that ‘era’. Mockups to come.
The drives tab lets you drag-drop folders from your Mac filesystem to mount them as new DOS drives, and unmount existing drives by dragging them back out again. If you need finer control you can also add drives with a standard OS X open panel, with choices for mount type and drive letter.
To supplement this, Boxer automatically mounts and unmounts CD-ROMs as it detects them being inserted/ejected. This should finally make playing multi-CD games as painless as it should be.
One of the problems with Boxer’s original workflow was that it would badger you to choose which program you'd like to run (and whether you'd like to run it forever after) before you really knew the right answer.
In Boxer 1.0, I've changed this workflow entirely. If a gamebox doesn’t have a default program yet, then Boxer just starts up at the DOS prompt: but it also slides out a program-picker panel, which shows the available programs inside the gamebox.
Click one of these programs to launch it, and the panel changes to a checkbox toggle:
Quit back to DOS, and the panel goes back to being a program picker again. At no point are you confronted and forced to choose, and at any point you can change your mind and choose a different program.
For gameboxes that have a default program already, the program-picker panel stays tucked away while the game is running – but slides open if you quit to the DOS prompt. You can show and hide the panel yourself at any time.
All of this has entailed a massive amount of work behind the scenes. Literally the only thing Boxer 1.0 has in common with Boxer 0.8x is the icon: everything has been rewritten in Cocoa from the ground up, and there’s not a trace of Applescript left.
However, that also means it's currently full of bugs and is almost completely untested. I'll be publicly releasing the sourcecode on bitbucket soon for intrepid souls to poke at; initial alpha builds will be made available through the blog only, and a proper beta release will probably be early next year once the code has settled and had time to mature.
Anyway, let me know your thoughts and suggestions in the comments!
Boxer 0.88 is in beta, and will be a point release to address bugs and incompatibilities that came to light from 0.87 and OS X 10.6. This version includes the usual aimless refactoring to bring about yet more bugs, so please report anything odd you find.
The biggest change in this version is switching DOSBox back from OpenGL to overlay output mode, which avoids a rendering bug on OS X 10.6.1 wherein the DOS window may appear blank until moved. Unfortunately, overlay rendering also sucks; this change will mean that fullscreen mode may show stretch-marks at certain resolutions, and the DOS window may appear off-center if you have a large screen. There are a lot of impolitic things I would like to say at this point, but let’s leave it that my contempt has now reached the stratosphere.
This version also tweaks the Snow Leopard shelf artwork to match OS X 10.6’s default grid spacing, which is unfortunately not under Boxer’s control. This will not affect existing folders, but if you have upgraded from 10.5 to 10.6 then new DOS Games folders may appear misaligned until you tweak the grid spacing from the View Options panel (⌘J.)
0.88 will hopefully be the final release on this Applescript codebase, which has long outstayed its welcome. I’ll then return to work on the 0.9 Cocoa branch, which brings with it countless clever features and ease-of-use improvements (among other things, a rendering mode that isn’t shit), and the ability to introduce substantial new improvements instead of just bailing out water whenever there’s an OS X update.
Sadly 0.9 will probably not be OS X 10.4-compatible, so it’s of particular importance to me that 0.88 works as well as it can on the venerable old Tiger. Report them bugs!
Boxer 0.87 (née 0.86) has now, finally, been released. There’s a chummy what’s-new summary on the front page, or the tediously complete release notes if you prefer. In brief though: Snow Leopard compatibility, 8 months’ worth of bugfixes, tasteful wood panelling.
I wanted to get this version out there right away, since the crumbly old 0.85 release was disastrously broken on Snow Leopard (which hit the streets this Friday.) There will probably be a minor followup release in the next week or two with additional localisations.
Unfortunately Snow Leopard forced my hand in another respect: the new 10.6 Finder alters the icon view layout and refuses to show background images larger than 2048x2048, both of which broke my original shelf art. I’ve applied a quick fix whereby 10.6 gets a different (and much smaller) background, which means folders have fewer shelf slots before the art runs out. I hope to address this with a more thoughtful and robust solution in future updates… once I see whether the shelf idea appeals to Boxer’s users in the first place.
Rapidly growing irritation with Snow Leopard edit: The default Finder grid spacing has changed for new user accounts, meaning that the shelf icons may appear misaligned. To correct this: open DOS Games, press CmdJ and pull the grid spacing slider all the way to the right.
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