OK boys and girls, Boxer 1.0 beta is finally here. This is the big one: Boxer 1.0 is now feature-complete and does everything Boxer 0.8x did and more. It’s also purest awesome.
I’ll be writing a series of blog posts over the next few days going into detail about the new tentpole features. In brief though:
Game Importing is back. Boxer once again imports games painlessly from CDs or folders into new gameboxes. Besides looking awesome, this feature now gives you more control over how games are installed, guides you gently through the installation process, and lets you customise the gamebox at the end. No mess, no fuss.
The Games Folder is back. Boxer once again creates a folder to keep your games in – dressing it up with sample games and a new-and-improved game shelf appearance, if you like (or leaving it plain if you don’t.) Naturally, Boxer will recognise and use any game folder you have from a previous version of Boxer.
Boxer now introduces itself with a classy Welcome panel. This lets you jump to your games folder, import new games or fire up a plain old DOSBox session without faffing around in menus. If you prefer, you can turn this off in the preferences, or make Boxer open your games folder at startup instead (like it did in older versions.)
Enough talk. Go grab the new version and get playing! (And be a good citizen and tell me about all the bugs you find.)
You know how back in July, I said all that remained was reimplementing game importing and the games folder? Well, it turned out that those two things were 80% of Boxer. These features are core to the Boxer experience, and reimplementing them properly — awesomely — ended up being a whole heaping bowlful of work.
Along the way of course, I got burned out on coding and fought off a crippling Minecraft addiction. But hey, that’s all behind us now.
Design by 40watt.
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