Keen observers will have noted a lack of visible progress on Boxer 1.0 over the past two months and may, perhaps, have lamented with wailing and beating of breast the dearth of new builds since January.
The principal reason for this delay was that I spent most of March on an impromptu and much-needed visit to my sheep-infested homeland and most of February frantically arranging said visit. As of Thursday, and after an unconscionable number of inflight movies, I am now back on terra firma and reacclimatising to dour Finland.
The other reason has been that in a fit of hubris I embarked on an ambitious rewrite of DOSBox’s old rendering pipeline: essentially replacing SDL’s renderer with my own, to give Boxer much tighter control over how DOSBox's video output gets to the screen. The benefits:
The drawback: by the time I’d finished tugging on that loose thread to my satisfaction, I had unravelled the entire sweater. Now I need to knit it all back again before anything works and I can release another build.
Understandably that’s a big job — among other things, mouse input is comprehensively, gloriously broken — so I’ve been entirely avoiding it by coding up paste-to-DOS-prompt and floppydisk detection instead. As soon as my USB floppy drive arrives, I can finally get some use out of my mint-condition Star Wars: TIE Fighter diskettes. Go team!
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!
As further proof that I have absolutely no idea what ‘beta’ is supposed to mean, recent Boxer 0.86 betas include some fairly fundamental internal changes. Of these, two will actually be visible and relevant to you:
Boxer’s “built-in” DOS utilities and Gravis Ultrasound drivers are now actually built-in: they are kept inside Boxer itself, instead of being copied into your DOS Utilities folder. This saves you about a dozen megabytes, and me a lot of heartache when the utilities need updating.
The DOS Utilities folder still works, but is now solely for your own personal programs and not Boxer’s. You can safely delete the REQUIRED and ULTRASND folders from your existing DOS Utilities, as these are leftovers and unused by Boxer.
Boxer's default DOSBox settings are now also built-in, instead of being mixed up with your own settings in ~/Library/Preferences/Boxer/DOSBox Preferences.conf. In fact, that preferences file is no longer used by the latest betas: if you have customised any settings, you should now put them in ~/Library/Preferences/Boxer/Shared Preferences.conf. This new file is solely for your own personal settings, and not Boxer’s.
The rationale behind these changes is to minimise Boxer’s reliance on files that are out there in Userland. This makes it harder for you to break Boxer’s intended behaviour (not that you would ever do such a thing) and much easier for me to push updates that don’t trample all over your personal stuff.
At the other end of the feature spectrum, the latest Boxer beta applies an ostentatious game-shelf appearance to the icon view for new DOS Games folders. Here’s how it looks:
Out of courtesy, Boxer will not apply this appearance to your existing DOS Games folder: only to new games folders it makes. If you want this appearance for your existing DOS Games folder, then the simplest way is:
There are other ways, but they’re complicated and hard to explain. If you don’t want to trash files, send me an email and I’ll walk you through it.
Cover Flow is still the default view for the DOS Games folder in OS X 10.5, but you can switch to the shelf appearance by choosing icon view from the Finder View menu. You will also need to adjust the folder’s View Options panel if you want it to always use this view mode.
Design by 40watt.