That’s right boys and girls: after 2 years in development and 4 months in beta, Boxer 1.0 is finally here.
You can see a list of what’s new in the update feed; this isn’t a huge update if you’re coming from one of the Release Candidates, and by any measure RC2 was already final-quality. But hey, now it’s official!
For those early adopters among you, Boxer 1.0 is now compatible with OS X 10.7 Lion developer previews—although full screen transitions are currently disabled in 10.7 as they conflict with Lion’s own full screen handling.
To my giddy delight and my server's abject horror, Boxer got pimped by Kottke.org and Daring Fireball this week: two of the biggest rallying points for afficionados of good Mac software. As a result Boxer has gotten a lot of uniformly rave press and brought thousands of new users into the fold. Welcome one and all, and happy gaming!
If you see other articles pop up about Boxer then do please let me know, because I am a vampire who feeds on attention.
Since the initial 1.0 public beta a few months ago, Boxer has seen major improvements to game importing, game compatibility, rendering, full-screen mode, games folder handling, you name it; and tons of smaller fixes and UI polish along the way. It now sports built-in Apple Help too, searchable straight from the Help menu.
And since the venerable Boxer 0.87, well… let’s just say this is a whole new app. One I can finally be proud of.
Now that 1.0 is out I can finally get back to sane release numbering, and can work honestly on new features rather than furtively sneaking them in under a “feature freeze”.
I have the following tentpoles in mind for Boxer 1.1:
The number one must-have feature is joystick support: this will probably initially be limited to CH Flightstick Pro emulation, with Thrustmaster and dual-joystick emulation added later on.
Along with that, I want better handling of multi-CD games to let you cycle through CDs painlessly. I’ll also be making Boxer rip game CDs to disc images, to improve copy protection compatibility and to let audio tracks come along for the ride.
Last but not least, I’m hoping to roll in MT-32 emulation, because my inner 10-year-old pines for the dulcet Sierra melodies of a bygone era.
From here on in, I'm hoping that releases will be frequent and improvements incremental, rather than major feature dumps once in a blue moon. That means you shouldn't expect these features in 1.1, but by 1.1—they’ll come out one by one as I go.
After 2 years of alpha and beta hell, I’m also hoping to avoid beta cycles altogether. However, we’ll see if that wish survives contact with…
…yeah. I’ll be bringing Boxer to the App Store sooner or later, once I get over my dread of one-star-reviews-from-people-I-can’t-contact-to-find-out-what-went-wrong. But Boxer will remain free and open source on the App Store, and I’ll continue to distribute a Sparkle-updated build separately via this site, for at least until I phase out OS X 10.5 support (which won’t be for quite a while yet, don’t worry!)
Boxer would probably need a few tweaks in order to pass the App Store submission process:
The default location for the DOS Games folder would need to change to ~/Application Support/Boxer/DOS Games/, since Apple aren’t keen on apps cluttering up the Home or Applications folders with their own junk. This may mean I'd remove the option to choose the folder’s location altogether.
I'd need to pull out some private API calls, which means no spinning windows and blur effects. Oh, the humanity.
Due to the nature of the App Store review process, updates may be nowhere near as frequent as I’d like. Hopefully though, keeping a separate distribution channel would allow me to release low-key incremental updates in between the App Store ones.
More on that topic when the time comes.
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.
DOSBox 0.73 was released today, with a slurry of improvements to speed, stability and emulation accuracy. Hence Boxer 0.86 is around the corner, and will be released next week (after testing and tweaking) to bundle the new DOSBox. This version will still be based on the same Applescript codebase as 0.85 and will include several game tweaks, installer improvements and bugfixes that came up since the 0.85 release.
An update to the 0.9 beta branch is further away, since it is integrated much more tightly with DOSBox and I need to go through the new codebase file by file sticking my grubby fingers back into it.
Because I love you, Boxer 0.85 is now available. Yes, this was called Boxer 0.81, but then I skipped a few versions out of vanity; there were so many improvements that a teeny 0.01 bump felt terribly meagre. Full release notes are here, but in brief this version is prettier, smarter and (I hope) more reliable in every respect. The new version will also be rolled out by automatic update in the next couple of days, once all you early adopters have stubbed your toes on it.
This release was made possible by me managing to install a copy of OS X 10.4 to a USB stick, so I could finally do proper testing. It’s amazing what you can do with these computer things these days.
Have a merry non-denominational holiday everyone, and please don’t give me any bug reports for christmas.
Edit: concerned about the linear relationship between Boxer’s girth and my hosting bill, I’ve trimmed the 0.85 download to a svelte 16.6 MB from 19.2 MB. This was done by optimising icons and removing unused emulation files from the Gravis Ultrasound drivers. If you have already downloaded 0.85, don’t bother doing it again; there have been no changes in functionality.
Get it now! The major changes are summarised breathlessly on the main download page, while the tedious nitty-gritty is in the changelog.
Despite the tiny 0.1 version increment, this version has the most improvements so far. Boxer 0.8 is a lot smarter about your Mac, more reliable, starts up faster, and asks fewer naggy questions. It also comes with a drag-drop game installer, which should take the guesswork out of installing and packaging games.
The riskiest change in Boxer 0.8 is that doubleclicking on Boxer no longer opens a DOS prompt: instead it shows your DOS games folder in Finder so you can browse your games. To get a DOS prompt now, you can either click on the DOS prompt icon in the DOS games folder, or just hold down Option as you start up Boxer.
For most users this should simply cut out the chore of navigating to the DOS games folder before launching a game. However, I expect there are users who prefer to fly by the seat of their pants and would rather have the old behaviour back. If the new behaviour bothers you, please get in touch and I can offer a custom workaround for now.
As astute readers may notice, the website has been reorganised and sports this spiffy new diary. I'm hoping this will be a good way for me to discuss where Boxer is going in future versions, and get feedback on where it has already gone. That is, as soon as I can work out how to get the comments module to work properly.
Design by 40watt.